Resurrecting a 1993 notebook!

So I just moved and while going through a bunch of very old boxes I came across a laptop that i had once used.
It's a Gateway 2000 colorbook from 1993.

I don't really remember or know much about it anymore but I am very much interested in bringing back to life (hopefully using the original OS windows 3.1)

I turned it on today, and while the battery doesn't charge the computer seems to boot okay. I don't know what BIOS it uses but it gives me one Long Beep so I assume that is a successful boot.

However after that, it's just a blank screen... no operating system loading at all...

Anyone have any ideas? I obviously don't have any recovery disks or anything.
Do you remember if we needed a boot floppy for these computers every time they turned on, or were they able to load straight to windows 3.1 from hard drive???

Any and all assistance no matter how trivial would be greatly appreciated. This was my dad's work laptop and I didn't really play with it much back in the days so I don't know anything about how it worked!!

 

omg ddp you are the man, i wouldn't have even thought about the driver issues and bios updates etc!

Thanks for all the links, I'll try to see if I can get some of these install disks and try it out later this week.. I'm sure I'll be back again with other questions

 

Old ones are a little fun like this. Generally you can boot via floppy (it might be set to this already). Usually you can't boot off a CD-ROM (if that machine even has one), requiring you to boot a floppy disk with CD-ROM drivers on it if you need that.

Once you boot up, installing MS-DOS should be pretty basic. A:>setup, Formatting C:, installing, etc. Then after that, you can install Windows by the same procedure.

Once you have set up Windows, it won't boot on its own though. You should not need the floppy disk any-more but you do need to edit C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT to have a line which says WIN on it. Otherwise you have to keep typing WIN each time you boot.

I've performed this in virtual machines and probably at least once in a real machine (as a child being guided by someone else though and had no idea what I was really doing).

Edit: If typing WIN does not work, you need to add C:\WINDOWS to your %PATH% variable which I believe is set in C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT or you can just add it this way:
SET PATH=C:\WINDOWS;%PATH%

 

i've used computers back in the mid 90s.I use to type run win to open windows.they use to open straight to dos.Use to play the old commander keen games and the duke nukem games.

 

if I remember the beep codes for these.. one very long beep is a total hdd or ide controller failure... I think it's F12 to get into the bios..

at least it's not throwing a totally unrecoverable "162 system options not set" error as it at least has a proper bios... not the commonly used micro hdd partition..

heres what you need to know to get it running.. http://dotcommie.net/projects/handbook/