Re: Toshiba Satellite Pro 420cdt without floppy

[Shyamal Prasad <shyamal.prasad@sbcglobal.net>]

    "Jaye" == Jaye Inabnit ke6sls <ke6sls@cox.net> writes:

    Greetings:

    Jaye> I just received this laptop for cheep.  It has 40mb Ram(max)
    Jaye> & 1.2gb hd.  The only problem getting linux on it is that it
    Jaye> has no floppy.  I tried to boot using it's cdrom drive, but
    Jaye> the prehistoric bios doesn't look for cdrom, only
    fdd> hdd or hdd>fdd.

    Jaye> Looking around for a floppy, I found resale sites wanting
    Jaye> over $100 for a silly floppy drive!  That is more than I
    Jaye> paid for the old laptop.  On Ebay, I found several, and they
    Jaye> have a small cord with an odd connector.  These are going
    Jaye> for $2 to $10 and I wonder if there is a way to learn which
    Jaye> one would fit this laptop.  Toshiba doesn't make it
    Jaye> available which fits what.

I hope you have some version of Windows on your machine.  If you are
prepared to install Linux without a floppy look in the Debian
installation guide. It is possible to use LOADLIN to boot Linux from
Windows I believe.

Be sure to look at Toshiba's web site for BIOS upgrades, though how
you can upgrade the BIOS without a floppy is an interesting question,
unless you have windows. A newer BIOS might allow you to boot from a
CD ROM (since it should just show up as a different IDE device).

I got a Toshiba Tecra (48M/1.2G) for real cheap ($1) some time ago and
I had a bear of a time getting a PCMCIA and/or a D-Link ethernet card
working in the docking station. I found a lot of very, very useful
information on the Toshiba web site including a BIOS upgrade, and very
detailed user documentation, albeit in very odd formats that required
me to use MS Windows. This is even though the machine in question was
first released about 6 years ago. The Tecra now works (though I had to
patch the SCSI driver to work around a broken PCI bus, hey, it was
only $1 and another $8 for an old SCSI CD ROM drive :-)

Cheers!
Shyamal