Hi. I have a laptop I’m trying to put together as a gift for a fellow Doper, and I’m having a devil of a time getting a CD drive to work with it so I can install Win95. My goal being to first install DOS so I can see the CD Drive, then installing Win95. No, the PC will not boot off of the CD, and it’s a moot point since I can’t see the CD anyhow.
My specific question : can a Toshiba Portege 650 CT see an external CD-ROM drive if I plug it into the same port as the external floppy drive?
This is the way the other Toshiba I have works (true, they are different models), but this one will not see the CD Drive regardless.
Some details:
I have spent much time on Toshiba’s tech support site, and am unable to find a CD driver listed specifically for the 650 CT, put can for other models.
I tried the drivers for the other models, no dice.
The external floppy works fine, and the CD powers up, access the disk, ejects, etc. when I plug it in. When DOS boots, this seems to work OK in config.sys:
DEVICE=TOSCDROM.SYS /D:TOSCDROM
But when autoexec.bat runs this line:
MSCDEX /L:D /D:TOSCDROM /M:10
I get the following message:
Device driver not found: ‘TOSCDROM’.
No valid CDROM device drivers selected
I have three identical Toshiba laptop CD drives, none of them seem to work. For reference, they are all Model XM-1402B.
Any ideas? From what I’ve seen on the Web, it looks like it might be possible that this PC is not even supposed to work with a CD - which makes me wonder how they got the original Win95 install on it in the first place…
I haven’t tried it for a laptop, but I was having the same problem with a desktop I was putting together. Turned out I had to use a more generic CD driver, the one specified for my CD drive wouldn’t work. Can you find a generic CD driver for laptops (although it looks like you may have tried lots of them already)?
Well, this page seems to suggest this product will support CDROM drives. When you say external, do you mean this external caddie they talk about in question 1?
Ok, I’ll try again, but this time I’ll just describe how I got to that page. I went to the ask iris page on toshiba’s tech support site and asked the question " Does the Portege 650 CT support CDROM drives?" They had a link to support bulletins for 650 CT portables and then another for troubleshooting CDROMs for laptops.
I would suggest Anthracite that either 1. you make a W98 startup disk, which has a whole bunch of cdrom drivers on it
2. get a zip drive, copy the W95 folder on the cd to a zip disk, then copy to the laptop. I do both of them.
My good friend worked for about 6 months doing L1 support for Toshiba laptops. He says that almost every day he wanted to say to the people having problems “Don’t you wish you’d just spent the extra few hundred dollars and gotten a Thinkpad or a Dell?” [/hijack]
This may or may not be useful: Semi-universal CD-ROM boot disk . Go to the bottom of the page and click on the link for “cdrom driver boot disk”.
also, a windows 98 cd is a bootable CD. It is possible to get a toshiba laptop to boot to a cd. You have to format the HDD blank, copy over the boot files and the toshiba BIOS program (its on the toshiba emergency boot disk) and use that program to boot to the CDROM. Then you need a bootable CDROM (win95 isint, win98 is) and then put in the 95 cd and install it
I recently had to go through this process with my toshiba laptop, fun fun.
No pweetman, nothing seems to work. It is very discouraging, especially since it’s a nice little laptop if only I could get the CD to work. And it would have been a great starting-off-college gift for a fellow, un-named Doper.
I wonder if there might be another approach you can take to get a CD drive working if you don’t mind forking over a bit more cabbage? It sounds like you are trying to get a device attached that is specifically designed to be recognized as a CDROM drive by the toshiba laptop’s BIOS. It seems that this model cannot do that. How about getting a CDROM drive that is designed just to be simply recognized as an external device by the computer? This must be the type of device handy is talking about.
My resoning is such : you can get and install things like ZIP and JAZZ drives and many other devices to computers. These are devices that many computer BIOS’s would not know of so the BIOS probably just registers it as some “external device”. The drivers with this device will take care of it.
[bit of an aside]
I had asked a question here about the possibility of using a regular IDE hard drive as an external drive for a laptop. It turns out that you can by making use of a certain adapter kit. It looks like you can also do this for CDROMS.
I think this may be one http://www.samintl.com/ac/425724.htm , but I’m not sure.
Anyway, it looks like you can get these for the USB, PCMCIA or even parallel ports. They also come with the drivers.
[/aside]
So here are three possibilities that I can think of, I don’t know which of the first two would be cheaper.
Get a cheap regular old IDE CDROM drive, then buy a converter kit that will let you plug this into, say, the USB port.
Buy an external CDROM drive that plugs into the USB or parallel port and forgoe the whole kit thing.
Both of these products should have the drivers to make this work.
The CDROM drive you have now is fine, you still have to find a driver that interprets the drive as just and external device. Maybe this means a different version of MSCDEX that is meant for this?
As a final caveat, I’m not that experienced with computers, so some of this is coming out my arse . Perhaps some wizard here can let us know if this is a possibility. Also,
as beatle has posted a couple of times now, there is an excellent discussion board at this place http://www.hardwarecentral.com .
I don’t know if its a typo or not but lines hat you posted from the laptops config.sys and autoexec.bat looks like you are telling the machine to load the CD-ROM driver from the CD-ROM itself.
(cut and pasted)
The external floppy works fine, and the CD powers up, access the disk, ejects, etc. when I plug it in. When DOS boots, this seems to work OK in config.sys:
DEVICE=TOSCDROM.SYS /D:TOSCDROM (I think it needs to read DEVICE=TOSCDROM.SYS /C:TOSCDROM )
But when autoexec.bat runs this line:
MSCDEX /L /D:TOSCDROM /M:10 (ditto here MSCDEX /L /C:TOSCDROM /M:10 )
(end C&P)
Try copying the driver to the C drive and adjusting your config.sys and autoexec.bat as above,I thing that will solve your problem with the laptop.
Hope this helps.
Peace
LIONsob
Part of me hopes you’re not right LION otherwise I look like an even bigger ass.
I didn’t really look at those lines because the vb code got me all confused. But, I think the /D:TOSCDROM tells the computer that the CDROM will be referred to as TOSCDROM and the drive letter is D so that it should be kept as is. The only possible error I can see from these lines is if the Autoexec and the TOSCDROM.SYS file are located on different drives but she probably has them both on the C or both on the A.
Thanks again guys, I really do appreciate your trying to help me out here. I’ll take a look at these suggestions, and the config and autoexec tonite when I get home to play with it again.
If worse comes to worse and seeing as this is for a fellow doper I will volunteer to transfer a full set of Win98 setup files off your Win 98 CD to the hard disk of the Portege so you can get the machine ramped up. I have the adapters that will let me remove the notebook hard disk and attach it to a desktop IDE cable and simply copy the files over.
I have not opened a Portege 650 before but most Toshibas have fairly easy to access hard disk modules on the bottom that will pop out if unlatched. If you can remove the hard disk module entire this is really all I need and would be simpler to ship.
If you want to do this yourself or have a friendly neighborhood geek the procedure is fairly simple (ie pop HD out HD- attach to adapter cable (make sure pin 1 polarity observed!) attach to desktop IDE drive cable - copy WIN 98 binaries to c:\win98 directory on notebook HD - remove - re-install and run setup out of that directory). The adapter runs around $ 10-15 or so.
A very interesting option…I have a 98 CD, and can buy the adapter. I will see if I can do something along these lines.
FTR, I don’t know if we are thinking of the same thing, are we? The CD does not plug into a PC Card slot per se, it is a very small, densely-pinned d-shaped interface. Still, it is likely that Win98 might see it this way…
This is the typical older toshiba interface and a co-worker has an older Toshiba in the same vintage as your 650 that uses this same swappable tiny “D” connector floppy/CD interface. I’m not sure if the CD connection is an IDE interface or not, though I suspect that it is.
. Perhaps some wizard here can let us know if this is a possibility. Also,