Any experience with Toshiba Portege 3480CT?

[Nautilus]

A neighbor asked me if I could help them with their Toshiba Portege 3480CT (bought used from who knows where). From what I've been able to gather, it formerly had Win98 and he decided that he wanted XP. So of course, he formatted the drive.

And therein lies the problem.

The Toshiba Portege 3480CT is an ultraportable type of laptop. It has NO floppy drive, let alone a CD-ROM drive! So how on earth can one get this machine back up and running? Is it possible?

He did get a CD-ROM drive that connects to the computer via a PCMCIA slot, and once I power on the machine, the CD drive comes to life, allowing me to eject the tray. However, it dies almost immediately after, and I cannot get it to boot off of a CD.

He also got a USB external floppy drive.. which is rather useless in this case.

Any ideas anyone? Frankly, this seems rather impossible to resolve, but I figured I'd pass it by the gurus at VirtualDr first. He's on a trip and will be gone for 2 weeks. If I can't get it working by then, I'll tell him to take it to Toshiba.

In the meantime, during these 2 weeks, any ideas would be welcome!

[Triple7's]

Yup, that's a tuffy and it gets tougher yet.
That laptop maxes out at 128mb memory.
No where near enough for XP. 2K maybe.
You can't even use a HD adapter with it either as it doesn't use a standard 2.5 notebook drive.
I've read a couple threads where a USB floppy drive will work.
Apparently, it'll boot to that.
Take a look in cmos, see if there is a usb device boot option.
If there's no options in cmos to boot from a usb device, shut the system off. Press and hold down the "u" key and power up again if it doesn't pick it up automatically the first time around.
You could try the same thing with the pcmcia cd-rom drive, only using the "c" key instead.

[Nautilus]

Hmm.. yes, I cringed when I asked him how much memory the system had (he said that it had 64MB). I told him that we would have to add memory if he wanted XP, but I guess that won't be possible now. Thanks for the info!

Regarding booting via USB, I'll give that a shot and let you know the results tonight. I already tried the PCMCIA option (hitting 'c' during the boot process), and the results were as mentioned above - the CD drive would power on very briefly before dying out again.

I'll try with the 'u' option and get back to you!

Thanks!

[jstanek7]

Have you tried looking at the Toshiba web page. http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/t...ProductMenu_1=(All+Models)&ProductMenu_2=-------------------------------&ST=1&SortOrder=LT_WEIGHT&awhit=9

Here is a link to setup to boot from a usb floppy.
Hope this helps.

[Nautilus]

Yay! (kind of)

jstanek7 and triple7's, your advice was helpful! I hadn't noticed a small usb port on the side of the laptop, and using that I was able to hook up the usb fdd drive and boot the machine.

However.. it still doesn't detect the pcmcia drive, which poses a problem because I am not planning to copy all the files from the win98 cd onto a bunch of floppy disks!

Any advice on how to install win98 now that I have usb fdd support? I tried booting off a usb cd-rom drive, but that didn't work either.

One plan that i will try tomorrow is do a google search to see if I can download a boot disk that will enable usb support for a cd-rom drive (if that even exists) The thing is, he also has a Toshiba LAN Port Replicator which also has slots for usb. However, using that, I am unable to boot from floppy disk. It appears that the 'u' option only works when the usb fdd is directly connected to the machine..

I will do some google searching in the morning (it's about 4am here now) but if anyone has any more advice or suggestions, I'd greatly appreciate it!

[Triple7's]

The thing is, he also has a Toshiba LAN Port Replicator which also has slots for usb. However, using that, I am unable to boot from floppy disk.

Without any drivers, I probably would have expected that.
Just a couple quick questions I have first.
1. Were you able to partition and format the drive with a boot disk or were you planning on letting the windows install from cd-rom do it?
Which leads me to question 2.
Are you using the setup cd's that came with the laptop or retail type win cd's?
If you have the original toshiba setup cd's, any required drivers for the port replicator or pcmcia drive should be on them and small enough to fit on a floppy. Use another computer to get them there. I would think that Toshiba's website should have versions of same as well.
If you get the drivers loaded and are promted to restart, don't.
See if they work without a re-start first. If they dont, then go ahead and reboot.
I've had problems with old Toshiba's when it comes to that.

[104456]

You could do a network install

http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/network/

[jstanek7]

You could try and load windows on a thumb drive or a use external and install it from there. I just copy the hole windows disk to my wifes hard drive and run the install from there.

[Nautilus]

Wow, thanks for the input everyone!

Triple7, I was able to boot with the Floppy drive, but I didn't try formatting because I noticed that there were 2 partitions (C and D), both of which contained some files. I've forgotten the exact names at the moment, but I remember that I didn't want to try formatting because (if I remember right) some of the files seemed to have something to do with USB, which made me wonder if those files were what had enabled me to boot via the USB Floppy Drive. Do you think that it is possible for the files that machine uses to detect a USB drive are on the actual HD? Or would those only be in ROM?

(P.S. The Win98 CD is a retail version, not the Toshiba disk)

104456, I'll be taking a look at that boot disk.. it looks quite useful, though a little complex. However, if jstanek7's suggestion doesn't work (I have a USB drive onto which I will try to copy the Windows files), then I will look into that next.

I have classes at my uni tomorrow and all next week so I won't be able to spend much time on this issue during the weekdays, but I will work on it bit by bit and let you know how it goes. Hopefully I'll be able to get it up and running! (and of course, if you all have any further ideas/suggestions/recommendations, let me know!)

[Nautilus]

Back again with the lappy issue! I continued to have trouble using the CD-ROM drive, so I finally ended up dismantling the laptop (a nerve-wracking process) taking out the HD, hooking it up to my desktop via an enclosure and copying the Win98 files to it.

HOWEVER: even though the initial setup process runs fine, now I get an error message saying "Windows 98 requires a computer with at least 16MB of memory"

I don't understand! BIOS shows the laptop as having 650000KB of memory, so that's more than enough! Why the heck is it not detecting the full amount of memory?

[Nautilus]

Never mind! I decided to try booting up with a standard Win98 bootdisk (from bootdisk.com) instead of the disk that supported USB and it worked!

It seems to be going through now, though you can expect me back if more issues crop up (which is likely)

[POSFACIABIB]

All kinds of Toshiba laptops are losing their hard drives
I hope you can afford to get rid of the lemon and spread the word to others