I'm trying to reinstall Win 95 on my old
gateway because it seems to have just
dissapeared when I turn the computer on it
says please insert valid system disk I get
most of the to the instilation and it says
line 20 open at adress I have no idea whats
going on

"I get
most of the to the instilation and it says
line 20"

I have no idea what that means.

But before doing much else, check the CMOS to see if the HD type is correct.

Is there a floppy in the drive?

If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

M2

Your Motherboard battery may be dead. As stated above, check the settings. A clue as to the battery will be the wrong date & time. Dead battary causes settings to revert to factory settings.

What happened was when the computer
was booting up a message apeared that
said "insert valid system disk"So I put in
the floppy that came with the computer
called "System disk" then a menu
appeared that had numbers one through
four on iit and I pressed one because it
said download operating system.then a
message came up that said "insert cd
with windows 95 or ms-dos" so I did and
then another message came up that said
"cannot load Line 20 open at adress
E3E:2AA"does anyone know what I
should do?

Have you checked that the hard drive is recognised by the BIOS ??

Check the first screen that comes up when you power on. It should have a line that tells you what keyboard key(s) to hit to enter the bios. Then look for a screen, normally the first that indicates the drives that have been detected.

Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

Yes it does recognize the HD's it says it on
the screen I already checked that.

I assume that you are using the Gateway recovery software. I suggest that you check the Gateway site for help on that problem. That doesn't appear to be a windows error message.

Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

Maybe the wrong disk? Put in the boot floppy and if you don't have it go to bootdisk.com for need boot floppy

P4 3.2 GHZ
Gigabye Motherboard
Corsair Extreme Dual Channel Two 512 MB RAM
Powerline Dual ehernet Adapter

I have the right floppy I need to know how
to get to the install past the line 20 error
message.Or can someone at least tell me what
the "line 20 open at adress E3E:2AA"means.

Hi, Maybe the boot files are corrupted on the Hard Drive. Boot from your floppy boot disk. Run from the prompt A:> Sys C:. Run also A:> Fdisk /mbr. The boot files will be reloaded to the drive and the Master Boot Record will be corrected.

Good Luck, Jim