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Toshiba T1000LE not booting up

Hi guys, I'm fairly new to this forum.
I was delighted to see how much info and work you have done into the T1000LE, well done all! About a year ago I got the same machine, did a full recap and it started. I haven't started it since, will bring it out again when I get home in 2 weeks time.
What I'm thinking about is to replace the CMOS battery, or is that not advisable? Has anyone installed a new battery, if so where did you get it from?
Come to think of it, I haven't tested the floppy drive yet if it works... The laptop starts straight into some service program for an Air Conditioning plant.

Question, does the T1000LE accept other HDD's than the original, or is it BIOS "locked" as the T3200 for example?

If anyone needs any "live" values or readings from inside the T1000LE, I'd be happy to help as I'm opening it again anyway for the CMOS battery.
 
Was yours dead like ours (just power LED flash on startup attempt) and the recap fixed it?
 
Tom_of_Åland said:
Hi guys, I'm fairly new to this forum.
I was delighted to see how much info and work you have done into the T1000LE, well done all! About a year ago I got the same machine, did a full recap and it started. I haven't started it since, will bring it out again when I get home in 2 weeks time.
What I'm thinking about is to replace the CMOS battery, or is that not advisable? Has anyone installed a new battery, if so where did you get it from?
Come to think of it, I haven't tested the floppy drive yet if it works... The laptop starts straight into some service program for an Air Conditioning plant.

Question, does the T1000LE accept other HDD's than the original, or is it BIOS "locked" as the T3200 for example?

If anyone needs any "live" values or readings from inside the T1000LE, I'd be happy to help as I'm opening it again anyway for the CMOS battery.
Click to expand...
Hey Tom,

As for the CMOS battery, I have discovered that the original T1000LE had two 1.2V NiCd button cells (2.4V in total) made by Yuasa. These I believe are quite difficult to get these days, so I went to replace it by a 2.4V NiMH rechargable unit. Since I live in Poland I bought the battery online via one of our local eBay like places https://allegro.pl/oferta/akumulator-2-4v-80mah-nimh-2-piny-6915611540.
The floppy drive (I think it's a Matsushita EME-263T) is a rubber belt driven unit. After so many years the property of the rubber is more like chewing gum now, so I have ordered a new belt on eBay. If I finally manage to put it all together I'll let you know how it works.
 
rzmijan said:
Hey Tom,

As for the CMOS battery, I have discovered that the original T1000LE had two 1.2V NiCd button cells (2.4V in total) made by Yuasa. These I believe are quite difficult to get these days, so I went to replace it by a 2.4V NiMH rechargable unit. Since I live in Poland I bought the battery online via one of our local eBay like places https://allegro.pl/oferta/akumulator-2-4v-80mah-nimh-2-piny-6915611540.
The floppy drive (I think it's a Matsushita EME-263T) is a rubber belt driven unit. After so many years the property of the rubber is more like chewing gum now, so I have ordered a new belt on eBay. If I finally manage to put it all together I'll let you know if it works.
Click to expand...
Hello and thank you for the help! The battery, is it a direct swap? I think I'll order the same. Oh I know Allegro, I'm there lurking often for vintage equipment :) I suppose I have a gum like belt as well, so if the belt works, please if you can share the details on it later...🙏
 
Tom_of_Åland said:
Question, does the T1000LE accept other HDD's than the original, or is it BIOS "locked" as the T3200 for example?
Click to expand...
I don't think it will accept any other HDD's. It is not "locked" really, rather its CHS values are hard coded into the BIOS ROM. I believe if you take the BIOS ROM chip into and EPROM reader/programmer you can find where the CHS values sit and program your own to match any IDE HDD you wish. Again, this is something I'm keen to try out when I have my machine up and running.
 
nullvalue said:
OH man.. I've got a bit of a horror show going on here.

Immediately after opening I noticed I had a component with a black spot on it, and upon closer inspection it looks like it's case is even cracked.
View attachment 1246847

Everything in this area is just caked in what I'm assuming here is cap juice.
View attachment 1246848

Gah!! the back side is even worse..
View attachment 1246849

Needless to say I haven't bothered to test any of these components until I get this board cleaned up.. At a minimum I'm guessing all these electrolytic caps need to be replaced.
Click to expand...
This guy had the same Q502 mosfet blow up and has a link to a replacement he used.
 
rzmijan said:
Not a direct swap, but all you need to do is to cut out the old battery and solder the wires to the new one - simple.
Click to expand...
Ok thanks, that's what I meant but my English is not so good... I was just thinking if there was a need to add some component to the battery circuit.
 
nullvalue said:
Needless to say I haven't bothered to test any of these components until I get this board cleaned up.. At a minimum I'm guessing all these electrolytic caps need to be replaced.
Click to expand...
Hi,
Finally, I've managed to now permanently repair my T1000LE. The final problem was a hair-thin trace eaten away by the cap juice (I've marked the place on one of your photos). In the meantime I also bought on eBay another T1000LE (visually almost perfect condition) and re-capping just did the job! Now I have two of them running perfectly.
My advises until now are:
- Recap electrolytes using high quality low ESR capacitors
- Recap tantalum capacitors if you're feeling you want an extra safety and long trouble free run. They degrade too over time, and when go bad they short and given enough current explode.
- Check MOSFETs and SMD elements around the power supply section on both sides of the mainboard
- The separate power supply board needs only 3 electrolytic caps 220 uF / 25V (if I remember correctly) low ESR, and you're good to go.
- Check the SMD voltage regulator
- Clean the mainboard and very carefully inspect for broken traces

Now I'm fighting with the 1.44 MB floppy drive. Bought and installed the belt but no luck so far, I'm getting frequent read errors and "Track 0 Bad - Disk Unusable" at the end of formatting.
Have you or anyone managed to bring the original (Matsushita) floppy drive to life ?
One more question - do you know how to enter into the BIOS of this thing? I've tried holding Esc or F1 during boot, but no go.

R.
 

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Two weeks ago I spent 3 nights in a row fighting floppy drives in a T1000SE and two T4700's. Despite part changes, replaced belts, etc., I could never get any of them to work reliably. The T1000SE drive worked long enough to upgrade one of the ancient BIOS versions in one of the T4700's, so I can't complain about that. I plan to replace all drives with gotek's because, well, no matter what I tried, they aren't going to work. I think Toshiba's floppy drives were a weak point of the system originally and after all these years they are not very serviceable.

My T1000SE seems to behave much better with a replaced sub battery and cmos battery. I ended up opening a 9V NiMH (I know, not NiCD...), and it had 7 1/2" tall AA diameter cells. Two went to the cmos battery and fit its area, and the other 5 when soldered in the correct distances fit between the brackets in the 5x AAAA sub battery zone. CMOS is staying fine after a few days of no battery/no power, but the hard ram disk didn't survive a few days (maybe sub battery is not good enough). The unit will charge an external battery pack 6x subc NiCD, but it will get quite warm before the unit gives up and stops charging it.

I put together a 1.25mm FFC to gotek 34pin adapter and ordered it from oshpark.
 
alank2 said:
Two weeks ago I spent 3 nights in a row fighting floppy drives in a T1000SE and two T4700's. Despite part changes, replaced belts, etc., I could never get any of them to work reliably. The T1000SE drive worked long enough to upgrade one of the ancient BIOS versions in one of the T4700's, so I can't complain about that. I plan to replace all drives with gotek's because, well, no matter what I tried, they aren't going to work. I think Toshiba's floppy drives were a weak point of the system originally and after all these years they are not very serviceable.

My T1000SE seems to behave much better with a replaced sub battery and cmos battery. I ended up opening a 9V NiMH (I know, not NiCD...), and it had 7 1/2" tall AA diameter cells. Two went to the cmos battery and fit its area, and the other 5 when soldered in the correct distances fit between the brackets in the 5x AAAA sub battery zone. CMOS is staying fine after a few days of no battery/no power, but the hard ram disk didn't survive a few days (maybe sub battery is not good enough). The unit will charge an external battery pack 6x subc NiCD, but it will get quite warm before the unit gives up and stops charging it.

I put together a 1.25mm FFC to gotek 34pin adapter and ordered it from oshpark.
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing your experience! Nice try on the batteries.
This is indeed infuriating, I've spent the whole last weekend trying to get this floppy to work. Tried a couple of different belts (some more some less stretchy and different lengths but no luck). I think the head driving/positioning mechanism is also a factor here - while in a desktop class PC the FDD head positioning is done directly via the shaft of a stepper motor (very tight tolerances, and no play) , here we have a silly motor transferring the torque to the head-driving shaft via a set of two thin plastic gears with noticeable backlash between the teeth.
I see this as a serious design flaw.
On the PCB of the Matsushita drive I've found one tiny potentiometer, not sure what it is for but I'm willing to experiment, otherwise I'm close to giving up on this.

Have you tried to enter into the BIOS of the LE/SE, or is it possible at all? I've tried holding the Esc or F1 as described here


but no success.

Is the gotek adapter your private project or something in the public domain already, i.e. available to download the PCB layout and the part list with schematic?

Btw, I've also bought T1000SE and T1000, but want to finalise the LE before I start messing about the others.

Thanks, and stay tuned.
 
I agree about the floppy drives - much work and no success. I even tried changing the drive motor out between a drive as a last thing because what seemed like a better drive acted like the motor wasn't that strong.

I don't think there is a BIOS configuration utility. There is a setup10.exe program on the ROM drive which you can run to "be in setup". I think FN-ESC also gives a small menu where you can change some things like the screen font, screen invert, etc.

The link you have shows running a program called SETUP1.EXE for the BIOS settings.

I think F1 has allowed me to force a boot to the ROM drive instead of the HARD-RAM drive and this is helpful if the HARD-RAM is not bootable for example.

I'll post the FFC 1.25mm to gotek adapter once I get some in, build them up, and make sure they work!

Good luck!
 
alank2 said:
I agree about the floppy drives - much work and no success. I even tried changing the drive motor out between a drive as a last thing because what seemed like a better drive acted like the motor wasn't that strong.

I don't think there is a BIOS configuration utility. There is a setup10.exe program on the ROM drive which you can run to "be in setup". I think FN-ESC also gives a small menu where you can change some things like the screen font, screen invert, etc.

The link you have shows running a program called SETUP1.EXE for the BIOS settings.

I think F1 has allowed me to force a boot to the ROM drive instead of the HARD-RAM drive and this is helpful if the HARD-RAM is not bootable for example.

I'll post the FFC 1.25mm to gotek adapter once I get some in, build them up, and make sure they work!

Good luck!
Click to expand...
If I hold F1 during boot it doesn't do anything, passes the memory test and boots straight from the hard drive.
FN-ESC indeed brings out a popup menu, but except for some basic screen, font, etc settings, nothing interesting there.
Another question is the RAM and HARD-RAM - during boot the first 640 KB is tested but in wikipedia and the Toshiba specs doc for the 1000LE I read it should have 1MB RAM.
A couple of more questions :

- Where is the RAM between the 640 KB - 1MB, and can it be made accessible for the operating system?
- How do I force the laptop to boot the DOS stored in the ROM chip?
- Is there a way to assign how much RAM we wish to use for the HARD-RAM or is it a fixed amount, I think I've seen somewhere a value of 16 KB capacity related to the HARD-RAM?
 
On the T1000SE my experience has been:

When I run the setup10.exe program, there is an option for how much memory to give to the HARD-RAM. I am presuming if I set that to 0, it would be available as some other type of memory (extended?).

Also in that setup10.exe program is a way to tell it how to boot, BIOS drive or HARD-RAM.

When I press F1 *while* the system is set to boot the HARD-RAM, then it boots the ROM drive.

That chart mentions a SETUP1.EXE - do you have that file?
 
alank2 said:
That chart mentions a SETUP1.EXE - do you have that file?
Click to expand...
On the hard drive I could not find the SETUP1.EXE or any toshiba utils, and the floppy doesn't work unfortunately, so I'm stuck at the moment I guess.
 
Thanks for the links. The final question is how do I get the setup file onto the laptop. Since the FDD is playing tricks on me, I would have to take the HDD out and into a laptop with an IDE interface and a working floppy...
 
Another option might be to transfer it over a serial port or parallel port. I use the norton commander and a laplink cable to transfer files, but there is also interlnk/intersvr if your DOS is new enough, etc.
 
I picked up a T1000 in a FB buy last week (also a TRS-80 Model 100). The T1000 power section caps were very leaky but no noticeable corrosion. got the caps replaced and a temporary battery solution and it boots up! The working battery connection is required. the barrel DC port does not power the laptop without a working battery connected to the mobo. I guess the external 9v is for charging.

The LCD screen is in bad shape but viewable. it looks like it is de-laminating or something? are there modern options for replacing the display?


t1000 Screenshot 2022-12-28 at 5.08.20 AM.png
 
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