This is an oldie - Gateway K7-700

[tlemaste]

It's not mine. It's my brother-in-law's system, and he's not too technical. It's an old Gateway system and the hard drive went out. I sent him a new formatted hard drive, and a copy of Windows 7. With no other hard drive in the system except the one I sent to him whenever he inserts the dvd and attempts to load from it he get an error message from Goback. How can he get that when it is definitely not on the hard drive? It's from before Norton bought the app, and it's still has the Roxio name on it. Is it part of the BIOS? What do I tell him to do? I need some real help on this one.

Thanks in advance,

Tom

[Daniel ~]

Bump!

[Gizmo]

Originally Posted by tlemaste

How can he get that when it is definitely not on the hard drive? It's from before Norton bought the app, and it's still has the Roxio name on it. Is it part of the BIOS? What do I tell him to do?

What's the error message?

I can't imagine it would be in the BIOS; seems more likely to be something on the DVD maybe?

[tlemaste]

The error message for Goback3 is "336".

GoBack Revert (336)

At the bottom of the GoBack 3 splash screen is the disclaimer:

INTERNAL VERSION - NOT FOR RELEASE

and

Version 3.11.59.1 Copyright 1997-2001 Roxio, Inc

It's not on the dvd. I burned the dvd from an image hosted by Digital River. The Goback comes up with or without a dvd in the drive. Unfortunately, my brother-in-law is 1,500 miles away from me or I would take it home and do things like reset the cmos. All I can think is that this Goback menu is part of the bios, or it is on an eprom. Not being able to get my hands on the system is really a bummer.

[Daniel ~]

Are you sure it's not something on the hard drive your trying to use? Have you tried re-partitioning and reformatting your hard drive?

[tlemaste]

Thanks for the quick replies.

As I stated in the first post, I had a 100 Gb hard drive that I had previously used on my system. I formatted the drive to NTFS with a single partition. This was a virgin drive at this point. I mailed the drive to my brother-in-law. He installed the hard drive and turned on his system and attempted to re-install WinXP. His WinXP was an upgrade version that was used previously to upgrade from WinME. Since there was no OS installed on the HD he was unable to install XP. Not being technical it would have been futile to give him the instructions for bypassing the upgrade barrier. I did the next best thing: I got a legal copy of Win7 off of Digital River. I downloaded and burned the image to a dvd, them mailed it to him.

When he tried to install XP, and then Win 7 the GoBack problem started. The copy of the XP upgrade was a retail copy.

Norton now owns GoBack, and there is a documented method of removing GoBack from your HD. However, it doesn't say what to do when the executable is not on the drive.

My next option is to have him disconnect peripherals and see what happens. But like I said, the guy is a good guy, but not technical in any way and I don't want too many of his fingers in the box.

[Gizmo]

Wow, I have to say that if this is really in the BIOS, it is yet another in a long list of reasons why I never liked Gateway systems.

Yeah, the only thing I can suggest is to try booting without anything connected and see what you get. A CMOS reset might not resolve the issue. If it's baked into the BIOS, it's likely some automatic thing that (knowing Gateway) you can't disable.

[tlemaste]

Okay, I had my brother-in-law try a few things. The only time it didn't fall through to the GoBack screen was when the HD was disconnected. My thoughts on this is that bios wrote a bootstrap to the HD, or messed with the MBR. Basically his system is a huge paperweight.

[Daniel ~]

I'm sorry Tom, I should have been more attentive to your post... bummer!

[tlemaste]

One of the additional items that he failed to mention is that while he can see the boot options in the bios he is unable to enable the cd as a boot device.