Hello,

I inherited a Toshiba Satellite Pro 420CDS. All I received was a laptop
with a battery, cdrom, NIC, and power cord. No floppy, no setup disks,
no documentation. Charged it up, system booted fine into Win98. Then I
went and messed with it...

I decided I would do a clean install of Win98SE on it. Without a floppy
drive or bootable CDROM (contrary to Toshiba's support website) I'm not
able to do the usual install procedures.

So, I get the bright idea of using another system to get the bare
necessities onto the laptop's hdrive. I borrow a 40pin/44pin IDE cable
converter and install the laptop's hdrive in a spare system. An fdisk, a
format /s, and I get the drive to the point where it boots to the C:
prompt just fine. After I copy the Win98SE cab files on it I reinstall
the drive in the laptop and get "Disk I/O Error. Replace the disk, and
then press any key". Hmmmm... Put the drive back in the spare system and
it boots fine. Checked the BIOS on the laptop. Changing the boot order
from HDD+FDD to FDD+HDD and vice versa do not make a difference.

My concern is during fdisk I noticed there was an additional tiny
non-DOS partition (which I promptly wiped out of course... doh). My fear
is the original factory install had some additional boot code in that
partition. Is this correct? Is there a special partition layout needed
for the disk? Can this machine be reinstalled without the original setup
disks?

Thanks in advanced.

--
Ed Wensell III - E-mail address is valid if you know the right bits to
drop.

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
- Ken Olsen, President & founder of Digital Equipment Corp, 1977

The problem is almost certainly that you didn't set the partition on the
laptop's hard drive "Active", which you CANNOT DO with FDISK unless the
drive is installed as drive C: on the primary master IDE device.

The hidden partition is NOT the cause of the problem, that model is very
standard and straightforward and doesn't use or require any funky hidden
partitions.


Ed Wensell III wrote:

Barry Watzman wrote:
I've tried a couple times since then. The drive is set to master, is the
only drive connected to the controller, and every time fdisk asks me if
I want to use the entire drive and make it active.

I also tried using a Win95 boot disk. No go.

I did find something interesting. Using a NetBSD boot disk and their
fdisk utility, I setup a 'funky' partition scheme on the disk.
Basically, a 40MB NOS-DOS partition before the primary DOS partition.
Rebooted under the Win98 DOS disk and setup the primary partition as
normal leaving the non-DOS intact. Setup system boots fine from the
primary partition. Place the drive in the laptop and it responds
"Missing operating system". Which leads me to ask, how does this
particular laptop save it's hibernate image? To a file on an existing
DOS-formated filesystem, or directly to a dedicated partition?

Although, I'm not ruling out the idea that using a second system to
configure the hdrive could be the problem. I might just break down and
buy a floppy for this thing to see if it makes a difference. If I can
find a decent price on one... So far the one place I found that lists a
complete floppy assembly wants around $120. Ugh!

--
Ed Wensell III - E-mail address is valid
if you know the right bits to drop.

"64-bits on the desktop since 1996"

A little over a week ago, I posted a question on how to reinstall a
Toshiba Satellite Pro 420CDS that did not have a floppy drive or it's
original install media. I installed the Tosh's hdrive in a second system
to try to get a bare-bones boot environment configured. It seemed like
no matter what I tried, the Toshiba would not boot from the hdrive.

Well, after finding many ways of making the system NOT boot, I followed
a lead from another forum and installed a multi-boot/partition manager.
More specifically, I installed Ranish Partition Manager
(http://www.ranish.com/part/). The package allows for more control over
the partitioning and booting processes. I suppose any boot/partition
manager would work. RPM was simply one of the first on the list when I
Googled.

After RPM was installed, I was able to force the booting off the primary
active partition. Voila! The Tosh was booting off the bare-bones
environment at which point I was able to setup CDROM drivers and proceed
with a standard Win98SE install. Win98SE automagically detected all of
the hardware except my PCMCIA NIC. A download and an IR transfer with my
other laptop (remember, no floppy... and no CD-burner handy) and the
unit was on the network. Woohoo!

In retrospect, it could be possible there were still some original
Toshiba-specific bits in the MBR which for some reason an fdisk /mbr did
not wipe out. All I know is it's working now. That's all I care about.


Original post:
--
Ed Wensell III - E-mail address is valid
if you know the right bits to drop.

"64-bits on the desktop since 1996"