Attempting to upgrade harddrive on an old Toshiba laptop. 1

[diogenes10]

Hi all
I have an old 486 type toshiba laptop, monochrome vga, 4mg memory, and 120k harddrive running win3.1

Last year I saw an ad for a similar one on ebay-little higher powered 486 and color screen with a larger credit card memory and a bigger harddrive and it got me to looking.

I bought an ibm cr card memory which boosts the memory up somewhere between 24 and 30k. I also bought a 3g ibm laptop harddrive and wanted to set it up with win95. The Toshiba doesnt have a cd rom, so I got a drive converter kit. I booted the temporary computer with a win95 setup disk, fdisked a primary and extended dos partition (roughly 1.8 and 1.2 respectively), and formatted partitions. Then rebooted temporary computer with a win98 setup disk and copied the win95 directory to the c drive.

Then the fun continued. (It began when I ruined one of the mounting screws getting the old drive out.)
1> the mounting holes in the toshiba caddy dont match the holes in the ibm drive.

2> the toshiba drive had mounting holes on the bottom of the drive as well as the sides, and the mounting holes also acted as feet, raising the drive slightly above the surface of the caddy. The ibm drive doesnt have anything like that and the bottom with the circuit board either touches or almost touches the toshiba caddy. Don't know if that's a problem waiting to happen.

3> went ahead and set the drive in the caddy, plugged it in, and attempted to boot. Get the following message
"This basic was aborted because this machine has no ROM basic. Use Toshiba's basic."

Don't know how to proceed.
Suggestions?

Thanks.

 

[Dreamland]

diogenes10 -

The circuit board of the IBM drive should be insulated from the caddy somehow. There needs to be some space for cooling, so don't use anything like a solid sheet of foam rubber across the whole circuit board. A coupe of small pieces of rubber will suffice - you have to improvise. You may have bigger issues, however:

The drive is not being recognized by the motherboard at all, thus, the "ROM Basic" message. I have no idea how to do it on that particular laptop, but you need to go straight into the BIOS settings first and add the drive parameters - if you even can. Some of the old Toshibas BIOS only allowed for the one or two Toshiba drives available at the time the laptop was shipped. I seem to recall models that did not even have the option to manually configure drive parameters (which you will probably need to do). I doubt if there is a BIOS upgrade available on the Toshiba site. Your best bet is to get into the existing BIOS and hope that you can manually configure the drive.

 

[diogenes10]

Dreamland
Thanks for answering my post.

I'd never done the fdisk part of a win95 install before. Your post got me started back on a hardware focus instead of looking for missing Toshiba software. Google on toshiba basic was giving me only 1 hit in Japanese that I could not read. When I finally thought to go with the other end of the problem and look at the no rom basic part, I got a lot of hits and the problem showed up. I'd not set an active partition.

So.. I put the ibm drive back in the desktop and set an active partition. The laptop is a T1950. I did find a newer bios upgrade (1994) which I put on. I put the ibm drive back in the laptop, it booted ok, and then attempted to run win95 setup from the ibm drive. It gave me a message about problems at the end of the partition.

At that point I got the manual out and figured out how to get into the bios-the harddrive choices toggle between none and 1000mb. (& I may be able to overwrite 1000 with a smaller number but I cant put in a larger one.) I then booted the laptop with a win95 startup disk made from another machine, deleted all partions, and tried to create new ones. It would only give me a 417mg partition.

I took the ibm drive back to my desktop. I have an old program called ezdrive I thought might help. I dont know how to use it or have enough instructions or both. It fixed the drive so it was unbootable, fdisk would not access it, and also added ezdrive overlay steps to my ME machine which I don't know how to get out of there. I then found an old version of ontrack. It recognized the drive as an ibm 3080 something or another, undid all the ezdrive damage, and set it up with 2 partitions-but the first one was approx 2g. So I put the drive back in the laptop and tried the ontrack diskette in the laptop, but it still wouldn't do anything that made the drive work in sizes that the laptop could deal with.

So
I have a 3g drive with mounting issues for my laptop.
It fdisks in laptop as 417mb
Laptop bios shows 1000mb maximum
and I obviously dont know what I'm doing with software tools to fool computers with hd size limits into using larger drives.
Im frustrated with the time ive spent because i needed it for other things, but i guess if it had gone smoothly it wouldnt have been a learning experience.
(It's really rather humorous because I was going to show my son how to do this!)
Do I have any options available to explore?

 

[bcastner]

Reread the OnTrack documentation carefully about what BIOS settings are required. It may be that "none" is the best setting.

If your version of OnTrack is current, and the drive still cannot be made to work in any decent form, you are, sorry to say, stuffed.

 

[diogenes10]

dreamland
I found a site with some pictures and descriptions of my mounting issue-it seems that laptop manufacturers changed the standard mounting design for laptop drives in the mid 90's. I have the opportunity to buy a special sled for $50 US to solve my problem. So at least I know what's going on and how much I can save by being creative.

 

[diogenes10]

bcastner
I'd have never thought to try "none"-thanks.
On line help presented several choices for setting drive parameters in bios to get to a size result. None wasn't an option. Went ahead and tried it anyway. Computer said something about bios not configured at best choice. Booted again and went back in, selected harddrive which now showed ???? for size. Ran DM again, and now drive boots in laptop with dynamic disk overlay banner.
On laptop-the first partition is still 2+g and the bios is back to 1000mb-only way I can check further is to retry win95 install. However the desktop won't recognize the ibm drive now, so I've lost my easy way to get the win95 files on it.
I'm considering my next step.

(my DM version is 7 something, I've found and downloaded a later IBM specific version which I can also try later if I need to-but I'm hoping this is going to work when I figure out how to get win95 install files on drive.)