revive old laptop TOSHIBA Portege 7010CT and windows 98

[weaselciuy]

Hello,

I recently found an old laptop in my aunt basement, it seems to work technically fine but the software in it does not.

Its an old TOSHIBA Portege 7010CT with Pentium II 300Mhz CPU, 4.1Gb HDD and 32+128ram installed in the upgrade slot.
It has floppy, DVD-rom, USB and lots of other ports.

Thing is i cant access the cd drive. Just after i press the POWER button i get a Toshiba welcome screen then immediately  takes me to the screen i uploaded.

I cant do anything there , cant use format c:, cant find the cd drive, cant use fdisk or anything.
All i can do is access floppy disks A and B and look "dir".

C drive has nothing on it except an 98000kb COM file.

If i could only make the win98 setup start i could handle from there. I`m guessing i have to to install the cd-rom drive?? I found a cd-rom drive on toshiba website for windows 95.

The laptop uses a weird expansion module to have a cd-rom + lots of other ports. I dont have any cd`s or anything else that might have came with the laptop when it was purchased.

I have a floppy drive on an old PC but its in another place. So if i have to make disketes i have to go there.
If you need other info please let me know.
Anything will help.

[recovering disk space - old attachment deleted by admin]

[weaselciuy]

by the way, i dont know how to access the BIOS (if it has one :p). CD-rom spins but not accesable in this DOS or wahtever it is.

[patio]

I'd travel to bootdisk.com and DLoad and create a Win98 bootdisk...it will have the neccessary drivers to access the CDROM....
Boot to the floppy....
Insert the Win98 CD...
Type D:\ and hit Enter to log the CD drive...
Then type setup and hit Enter...

[weaselciuy]

ok, thanks, hope this works. I`ll go make the disk now and try it later, hope it works. Nice piece of hardware.

[weaselciuy]

ok, before going out to make the bootdisks i did a quick search about the cd-rom not being recognized and i found this thread - http://www.nocrash.com/ncbbs/msgs/3247.shtml .

Alot of people say to BASH the laptop and the cd-rom drive will work, i said what the *censored*. I did it and now IT WORKS, i formated C: and now i`m installing windows98 as i type this lol )))

Old technology is so much understanding then new one . Rusian method worked ...

[patio]

***sigh***

[BC_Programmer]

That is the stupidest thing I've ever read. At least 80% of the people posting there were saying something to that effect.

Hey, if hitting a laptop fixing it, maybe hitting it with a sledgehammer will make it faster?

EDIT: Also, it's interesting how somebody is now able to start windows setup without the CD. Seems hitting computers makes data appear as well.

[weaselciuy]

thing is first time i inserted CD, and it booted from hard disk, as if CD drive was not installed. I managed to check bios and it was floppy-cdrom-hdd, so settings were correct all the time. After shuting down PC< slap it 2 times, then turn it ON it booted immediately in Win98.

I cant explain otherwise, and i bet that making a bootdisk would not have helped as the cd drive seems to install on its own even after format.

I think there`s a loose cable somewhere , anyway russian method ftw.