Gateway millenium troubles - need help please

[808smokey]

OK

I need you help

I made a big no no in the "Gateway" world

This lady gives me her computer to fix. She gives me all the gateway restore CD's and everything else. So I start to work on it. It won't do anything. It boots then says windows caused an error then restarts on its own. So i put in the restore CD. I go through the steps then it says "Install Windows for the 1st time". It then hang with a black screen and a cursor in the top left corner. I try this several times with the same result. So I use a win98 boot disk, fdisk the partition and go for a clean install to remove ALL problems. Well now it says, "fatal error 6606:0066" then reboots. Sooooo..... I guess I screwed the pooch. I deleted the file that says it's OK to use that restore CD. Soooooo, Does anyone know how to fix this?

If not I just put win98 on it but she had WinME before with all the gateway crap that goes with it. Lesson learned here, again.

As soon as I pushed "Y" in FDISK, I thought Nnnnnoooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!! Anyways thanks for any help

[gitreel]

Is the restore cd scratched?

If so, try to buff and polish the disc.

It could also be a bad hard drive. Gateway uses cheap offmarket parts.

[adam]

Yeah that's a possibility. Back in the ole days when I bought my pc's at retail outlets I had a restore disk that stopped working. If you contact Gateway they should send you a replacement. I think mine wasn't even under warranty anymore.

[redwudz]

Some computers use a second partition to put the 'factory' files on. You may have wiped it out. But the recover discs are generally made for a complete noob, so (At least in theory) they should restore/recover from just about any damages. I would go with adam and check with Gateway and see what they suggest.

[808smokey]

Well the CD seems ok

As for calling gateway, not gonna happen. This lady wants her puter back ASAP. So I'll just put 98 on it. She'll never notice a difference and it will most likely go faster than before.

Another odd thing I forgot to mention:
In FDISK - the only partion was a "NON-DOS extended partition" (I think)
It was option 4 under the delete menu. There was no primary, extended or the 3rd option. So I think that's why the restore cd screwed up.

Thanks