New to vintage computing, troubles with Toshiba T3100e

[TheGrungler]

Greetings, Internet denizens!

I found a t3100e on ebay recently that was advertised to turn on and boot into BIOS. After I purchased it, I realized this was true (at least while the switch on the right side was on PRT).

In an attempt to justify the choices I've made so far, let it be known that I tried (and failed) to use chatgpt to walk me through the installation and troubleshooting. I have learned that this is sub-optimal. The first half of this post documents what I did and the second half is where I am now.

I'm trying to get an OS running on it. I'm looking at FreeDOS [ https://www.freedos.org/download/ ], specifically the floppy only edition. The full version seems to be too large for me, as uncompressed it is larger than my 40-or-80 MB hard drive(s) on my t3100e.

I ordered a disk reader off ebay, it broke within 15 minutes, I pulled out my old disk reader from storage, which seems to work fine. I can see the floppy drive A: in file explorer. It takes about 30 seconds to open the folder, which I assume is just because it's old and not as fast as my hypersonic-speed 2016 Seagate HDD. I read this as "this drive is gonna be fine". I tried to format it via the command line, Rufus, WinImage, and rawwrite. Only rawwrite seemed to work. Rufus wouldn't detect my USB disk drive even with the advanced setting on that specifically told it to check USB drives. WinImage worked for some drives, but not others. (For reference, I tried 3-4 disks with the first drive before it broke, and it didn't work for any of them, always something about Head 44 Section 0 not available, or something along those lines).

Somehow or another, I got rawwrite to say it finished writing the x86BOOT image to my floppy. I then opened the port on the drive (it no longer appeared in file explorer) and plugged it into my laptop.

I was greeted with the CMOS battery failure screen as shown in the manual [ https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/Toshiba/Other/Toshiba T3100e - Maintenance Manual.pdf ] (page 24 of the pdf). I assumed this was fine and I pressed f1 to go into BIOS (my switch is still on PRT at this point). After exiting BIOS on default settings, it ran its standard memory test and then printed "ERROR INITIALIZING HARD DISK CONTROLLER". If I sit on this and wait long enough I am prompted with "insert system disk in drive / press any key when ready..."

At this point, I do, and here is where my knowledge ends. It starts printing `.Error!` repeatedly until I power off.

The question I have for you all is:

What went wrong, and how do I fix it? I'm a complete noob when it comes to this stuff, and I picked this computer out because of the pretty display and because it was on the cheaper end. If there are any better resources for information than the manual (or if the manual does in fact solve my problems, and I just can't read), where can I find them?

Thank you all! I will attach images if necessary, but I'm on my phone right now, so I won't include any in the original post.

 

[TH2002]

Welcome to the forums.

First of all, relying on generative AI to walk you through vintage computer troubleshooting is a disaster waiting to happen... but I suppose we all make mistakes.

If I understand your post correctly, you're trying to boot FreeDOS on the T3100e after writing it with rawwrite? I've never used that program, but WinImage has never failed me except in cases where the floppies themselves were bad. Also, in my experience, a floppy drive taking 30 seconds to open is not normal. Either drive (the one you're using to write the floppies and the T3100e's) could need maintenance in the way of cleaning the heads and lubricating the drive rails. At the very least try hitting the drives with some compressed air to see if that helps.

Also, if you don't mind me asking, why not just try an MS-DOS 3.3 or 4.01 bootdisk? With a properly written floppy, that'll at least tell you if the T3100e's floppy drive is working or not.

The "ERROR INITIALIZING HARD DISK CONTROLLER" message is coming from the fact that the original HDD (which your machine likely still has) either isn't working properly or you simply didn't enable the "Type 11" preset in the BIOS. Have you tried doing so?

The BIOS in these machines only supports two hard drive presets by default. Type 11 is the Conner CP-3022 20MB drive that the T3100e originally came with, and type 12 is the Conner CP-3044 40MB drive that the T3100e/40 came standard with. These are the only drives that will work with these computers out of the gate. To use any other drive, you have to modify the BIOS or use drive overlay software, which I admittedly don't have much experience with.

 

[TheGrungler]

Thank you for the insight! I've been working on it for a bit, and here's a little update.

1 - The file explorer window opened in about 3 seconds this time, which I believe to mean the disk and the drive are both functional. Below are the contents, which again, I assume to be correct (these are the same contents that showed up on WinImage, which was reassuring).


2 - Out of confusion and, to be frank, stubbornness, I decided against spending ~$30-40 on a single DOS disk (I have no idea if I need a Toshiba-branded DOS copy or just any generic one, since some were sold for IBM PCs, and a small handful were labelled for Toshiba and were much more expensive), and opted for a stack of 10 blanks for around half that. I don't own a stock DOS disk, which admittedly makes it a little harder to figure out what in particular is broken.

3 - I decided to turn it back on and just give it another shot without changing anything, taking pictures this time. I tried it with the hard drive in both type 11 and 12. Both times I got the hard drive init error.
3a - unfortunately, for the life of me, I can't get my phone camera shutter to behave with the screen of the laptop, so you'll have to take my word for it.

When the computer turns on, the first red LED from the left lights up for a blink and then turns off. It does not turn on again and it is the only one that does this.

The hard drive error still flashes, and when I put in the system floppy it prints .Error! after every keystroke. The second red LED from the left lights up momentarily too, though for slightly longer.


It took me a while to figure this out since my laptop doesn't have this panel. However, this helps a bit because I know the HDD light flashes momentarily and the FDD flashes for a little longer after it prompts me to enter the system drive and press enter.

I took it apart earlier to check if any of the capacitors had leaked, bulged, or exploded, and I was very happy to see nothing out of the ordinary both on the system board and in the power supply.

I figure a good way to figure out what's going on now is to consult the manual and run the diagnostics floppy. However, I don't have one, so I'm trying to make my own. I found a .ima file that allegedly has what I need, but WinImage doesn't like my floppies and/or my disk drive, so I tried to get it into rawwrite. I think that it didn't work, since it tried to boot, went thru the bios, and hung after the disk error on a blank screen.

My current question is: are there good options for external USB FDDs? I have an old garbage one I bought in 2016 for about $4.

 

[maestro]

Hi,

I'm no expert and troubleshooting remotely is hard, so bare with me. Foremost, a 286 with plasma is pretty sweet but for a newbie more complicated than a 386, so expect some quirkiness.

My current question is: are there good options for external USB FDDs?
- I've never heard of there being better USB floppy drives than others. I'd say they're all crappy unless it had a decent brand name (Sony, Verbatim, BASF?, some company that makes floppies) , otherwise it's a roll of the dice.

It sounds like the laptop floppy drive is semi-working, it sounds like the FDD LED is becoming lit momentarily between "insert disk, press any key" and "Error!". If that's the case then it's a good sign, next you need to determine if the drive is defective or if the heads are dirty. - Is this correct? Does the FDD LED flash every time you press enter, like it's trying to read the disk every time you press enter?

You *desperately* need a known-to-be-working bootable floppy disk. If you can prove that your floppy disk is bootable and the laptop floppy drive is able reading the disk, then try hammering the Error prompt because if it's just dirty heads it should eventually read and progress slightly more, emitting more floppy drive noises, like it's reading the disk a little further but then the dirty heads cause another error.

Do you know of anyone with a older computer with a floppy drive that you can test your floppy disk on?

(Sub-optimal, I can't believe you even tried! lol. We discuss the state of AI at work, nothing good gets said. I tried a coding assistant! Not impressed at all.)
(If worst comes to worst, someone will mail you a bootable floppy)

 

[TheGrungler]

I will say I am skeptical of nearly all of my equipment used here, though I did try to image a diagnostics disk and use that to test the HDD, a la the manual. I believe that the FDD is faulty in some way since, when the switch on the side is on A, the computer will hang at a blank screen after leaving the standard BIOS setup. Neither I nor anyone in my immediate vicinity owns anything with a floppy drive or a bootable floppy, which leaves me at the whims of the craigslist wizards.

I don't expect much more work to come in the immediate future, as my options now are digging around for bootable floppies and new FDDs.

That being said, I assume there's an upper limit to the DOS version I can install. I know 3.2 and 3.3 work. I've heard mixed things about 5.0, but it seems like the issue there was a result of the boot switch on the side being on the wrong setting. Is DOS 6.x reasonable to use? I worry mostly about RAM usage and disk space used over everything else. If I can find a bootable floppy of the OS I want installed, I believe that I could circumvent needing to write disk images in the first place.

(Sub-optimal was an understatement - as much as I hate using AI, it sounded better than just taking shots in the dark; though to be fair it probably wasn't.)

 

[doshea]

I'm pretty sure MS-DOS 6.22 works just fine on one of these, and I would imagine that FreeDOS probably does so long as you get a release that is designed for 286 or earlier CPUs (which I think you did).

From a look inside a FreeDOS disk image, it includes the string "Error!" in the first sector, so it might be actually starting to boot from the floppy, but then failing after that for some reason. Did you write the version of the image from the 144m directory?

Perhaps if you get raread, you could try reading back the contents of your floppy to a new image file, then compare the new image against what you wrote to get some confidence that your procedure for writing via the USB floppy drive is working correctly. If you're not sure of a program to use for comparing the disk images, I think WinMerge might be suitable.