I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 430 CDT. It came with Windows 95
installed and there was a program to create a backup copy of Windows 95
(28 Diskettes). Over time some of the diskettes had gotten corrupted so
I got a CD copy of Win 95 a while back. Recently I decided to clean
everything off and start over and so I formatted the C drive. My users
guide said to remove all PCMCIA cards. One of my cards was my drive D.
But when I have tried to reboot using my Toshiba companion diskette it
either says things such as I have an invalid disk or there is an IO
error.
Is it your impression that the bug you mention in passing
below, is why it can't read the disk, or is it possible the
drive is work out, dirty, or (similar to worn out it is...)
out of calibration so it could read discs it wrote but not
those written by some other drives?
The 430 CDT has a bug in the Diskette drive and a while back we
were sent a patch to fix the problem.
What is the nature of this bug? How is it manifest and
where is the patch applied, what further info do you have
about it?
The FD does work most of the time
but it is not perfect.
If you have another system that can read the Toshiba
companion diskette, you might make a copy of it, write it
onto another disk and see if this new disc is readable in
the laptop. Of course, you can't just copy the files, it'll
have to be bootable, perhaps a Dos format/s command or a
disc-disc duplication such as done with "Winimage"...
Winimage has a free trial period, IIRC.
A friend of mine said that I could use a Windows
98 setup diskette and then access my CD-ROM drive which has my CD copy
of Windows 95. But that didn't work and I got some of the same results
as when I used my Toshiba companion diskette.
So it couldn't read the floppy at all?
To be clear, this system has previously booted floppies ok,
perhaps even the companion disk or had it never been able to
since day 1? Just trying to determine if the floppy drive
is viable at all as a boot method.
I need somehow to get
past the FD stage so I can access the Win 95 CD setup program. Any
ideas?
Not knowing what that floppy patch is, there's a variable I
can't resolve. Otherwise, maybe you just need a new floppy
drive?
One other alternative is to just pull out the hard drive,
use a 2.5"-3.5" laptop IDE adapter to hook the drive up to a
desktop system, where you can partition and format it if
necessary, check the disc with the (HDD) manufacturer's
utilities to be sure the drive is viable at all (do a
thorough test in their utility), then do the following:
1) Make the drive bootable. DOS command "format /s" will
do it if you have the dos files in a directory locally.
"SYS D:" would work, providing "D" is the drive letter-
substitute the drive letter the system designates for it.
2) Copy the WIndows CD installation files to a folder on
the laptop drive. Call it "win95" or something like that.
3) Create a standard text file on the drive named
"autoexec.bat" and in it, put the line:
smartdrv.exe
Also find (Google if necessary) smartdrv.exe and copy it to
the drive.
4) Create a standard text file named "config.sys" and in it
put:
device=C:\DOS\himem.sys /testmem
ff
Also find (Google if necessary) himem.sys and copy it to the
drive.
5) So at this point you have smartdrv.exe, himem.sys,
config.sys, autoexec.bat and the Win95 cd (copied to it's
own folder) on the notebook drive.
6) If you need supplimental drives, for the CD drive in
windows or to network for further file accessiblity (like a
network adapter or modem driver), it would be good to copy
those to a folder on the notebook drive now too...
remembering that if they're zipped (or another compressed
format windows can't natively handle), you would need unzip
them first so they're ready to use later.
7) Put drive back in laptop, it should boot to dos and load
the smardrv.exe (smartdrive cache which vastly speeds up
windows installation). Then run "setup.exe" from the win95
folder. Note there may be two "setup.exe" files, you don't
want the one from the root of the CD, rather the one in the
CD's win95 folder. (there was a basic presumption you have
a basic familiarity with dos, if not, at the dos prompt you
type "CD win95" to change directory to win95 folder you
created, and "CD win95" again to change to the win95 folder
that was copied from the CD, before running setup.exe. Or,
at the prompt you could just type
"C:\win95\win95\setup.exe", providing you used the folder
name of win95 as I had suggested above.
It's been quite a while since I've installed win95 on
anything, I might be remembering the folder name wrong or be
forgetting something. A laptop-IDE adapter can be found
online for about $4.
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?hl=en&btnG=Search+Froogle&q=laptop+IDE+adapter&price2=7.00