Packard Bell Hard Disk Replacement

I recently obtained an old Packard Bell machine which I wanted to use as a Windows 98 games PC. It has quite a nice looking case and came with the original manuals and CDs. It wasn't obvious from the case what model it was or how old it was although it had the Windows 98 logo on the front. I got it home and was disappointed to discover that it was fairly lowly Pentium II 300 Celeron. However, it had a Yamaha soundcard and a Rage Pro graphics adapter on board but it just wasn't fast enough to run games (particularly the original Sims). I am loath to throw any computer equipment out unless I really have to and I was on the brink of taking it to the local tip when I suddenly remembered I had an old board and processor that fitted in a PII slot. After much searching, I finally came up with a ZIF socket Celeron 500 fitted into a adapter board. Out came the old PII 300 and seconds later I had a Celeron 500 machine. I also found some memory (256Mb PC100) and a 40Gb hard disk. The memory went in fine. Swapped the hard drives (the old one was a 6Gb) and tried to boot the
Packard Bell Master CD to install the OS. Unforunately, it came up with an error. It seems that Packard Bell installs a special file onto their hard disks based on the configuration of the motherboard and without this it won't install. After much Googling I managed to find the answer. There is a program on the floppy boot disk that comes with the system called TATTOO which does the trick. It can be invoked as follows:-

Tattoo /createhsfromdmi

once the floppy has booted. This copies the file to the HD (must be formatted) and off it goes. I was amazed the PC didn't need a BIOS upgrade to see the new drive and the OS installed perfectly. I installed a 32Mb NVidia display adapter courtesy of another box (NEVER throw anything away) and it runs The Sims a treat and the wife is a happy bunny (until she discovers Sims 2 - ssshhh don't say a word).