Please help me with my rare Toshiba libretto 30CTK

[Dominik015]

Hello!
Someone at work gave me this Toshiba Libretto 30CTK for free



I'm trying to get it to work. It doesn't boot. It doesn't see the HDD.
So i thought... okay, the hard drive is broken. But its not. I connected it via an adapter to my windows desktop and i can normally access it.
I have created a win98 boot disk, and with that, it also gives me an error, but later in the dos i have no option to check it.
I have attached a few pictures. The battery was replaced by someone with larger cells, but the voltage is fine.

Any ideas what could be causing this issue?

Thanks.

UPDATE: it now says HDC error during booting

 

[djg]

No knowledge of this particular machine. Can you manually select the proper hard disk in the BIOS screen? Possibly type H or cursor down to it and hit space?

 

[Dominik015]

No knowledge of this particular machine. Can you manually select the proper hard disk in the BIOS screen? Possibly type H or cursor down to it and hit space?

Unfortunately thats not changing anything. In dos its: a: and b: is the floppy drive and c: the ramdrive

 

[GiGaBiTe]

I worked on a 50CT some years ago and I remember it being VERY picky about the drives it would recognize. If you have another drive that's smaller than 2 GB, you might want to try it. Also check that there is no damage to the connector inside the laptop. I think these things support the IDE to SD card adapters if you use a small enough SD card.

You may also have to recap the machine. I think these Librettos use the fake tantalums, which are electrolytics in disguise. They leak and cause the machine not to work properly.