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Toshiba T5100

A

Albert

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Joined
Oct 31, 2010
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Hi, I recently bought got a Toshiba T5100 from a garage sale for $5 bucks. I'm quite surprised that it turns on, though I'm getting 2 errors:

1. CMOS Battery is dead, so I have to reconfigure that, each time I turn it on (Besides switching it off and on rapidly). I've read somewhere that the CMOS Battery can be supplemented with a AA Battery. Is this true? And what am I expected to do, to get one installed into the system?

2. The Hard Disk fails to load, giving this message: "ERROR INITIALIZING HARD DISK CONTROLLER" to which it goes to a CMD Prompt screen asking me to enter the system disk, which I'm unaware of whether I should supply a standard DOS bootdisk, a proprietary bootdisk, or maybe even have it just boot a custom Freedos floppy distro? It doesn't seem to recognize any of the HDD settings I supply it with in hopes that I stumble upon the right config, so what's the risk in trying that?

And also, I haven't seen much documentation on the system in terms of how it looks on the inside. I've only ever owned one other DOS Portable computer, and it went dead on me and I had it thrown out by some jerk who promised he'd fix it for me. Hence, my knowledge of these pre-Thinkpad laptop systems is very little. I don't think that many people would own this particular system, but if they do, I would appreciate either a fairly concise diagram of the internals, or maybe someone could just snap a few shots of the system opened up? I would really appreciate that, as I bought this without any documentation and only a standard power cable.

Thanks again,
Albert

EDIT: I realize there's a chance that the HDD may be toast, of all things. What type of HDD is in this system? Because I haven't got a good knowledge of what was around before IDE, or is that what it is?
 
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Have you opened it up yet to see what type of hard drive and CMOS battery are inside? That would help us a lot.

A standard DOS boot disk will work just fine to boot it.

It has a 40mb hard drive. Not sure though if it's MFM/RLL or IDE.
 
I'm saying that I don't want to open it up until I'm certain I know of a safe way to do so. Usually, I would crack open a system if I knew how to put it back together; something like this, which I have no prior knowledge of and seeing how it was built proprietary (as is the case with most laptops), is something I'm afraid to tear into. I was simply wondering if anyone has dealt with this system before. If I don't get any answers anytime soon, then I will muster up the courage to slowly open it myself. I just don't want to risk opening it now seeing as it works so fine besides the problems I've stated.

However, I think you've given me more than enough info, as I reread your post, to crack it open if I have to as a last resort. Sorry for going into detail about all that, and thanks again.
 
Ah yes, here's this video where I read on using a AA battery. Looking at it again, I realize I overlooked the fact that the guy... Actually had the system opened up and in plain view... :mad:

Silly of me to completely overlook that. He even shows the real CMOS battery.

EDIT: And this is the HDD his system has. Don't know if mine was swapped out or what.
 
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That's an IDE drive.

I have a computer that has a AA CMOS battery. I just replaced it with a regular AA battery and it works fine.

Does the hard drive spin up at all? When the computer try to access it, does it make any out of the ordinary sounds?
 
Alrighty, so I gave it a test run to see if I could spot any sounds out of the ordinary. It's one loud piece of equipment with all the drives, fan and such stuffed into one tight space, but I made out a distinct sound that just repeated over and over. The sound of a HDD whirring up real fast in a sort of tapping "Whir, Whir, Whir, Whir" sound, that I suspect the drive to be running but not functioning properly. Again, I can't quite make it all out, so I guess I'll need to make a recording.

I'll get that ASAP.
 
Does the error message that you specified come up every time you start it up? I would suggest running SpinRite on it, but if the controller is bad, that won't do any good.
 
I do get that error message everytime, yes. Anyways, I could try and run spinrite when I find my disks, and see if that helps... But here is the audio file I recorded, that may or may not help. That strange sound all through the whole clip is artifact left over from me using noise removal, to try and make the system sounds more clear. I don't have any high quality mics lying around or nothing. :(

Here: test.ogg (It's 4Shared by the way, incase you don't like frequenting questionable filehosting sites)
 
I believe you may be right about that. The sound appears to be coming just from the back to the side where the PSU is at.

Seeing as the BIOS specifies it's limit of 100mb, could I possibly stick another HDD in? and possibly a larger one?

In fact, could I use a slightly larger drive (10, 20 GB) and have the system work off the 100mb?
 
Awesome! Thanks for all your help. I hope to have this system up in the week. Just gotta find my spare 20GB.
 
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