Toshiba T5100 and non-Conner HDD support

[dosstojny]

Hello.
I've just bought a Toshiba T5100 portable PC. The first problem I had to face with was the seized original Conner HDD. I've read that vast majority of portable Toshibas of this era don't support drives different than specific Conners 40 and 100MB.
Just for science I plugged my different HDDs with default BIOS settings. I used three hard drives: 1,3GB and 2GB Toshiba HDDs with polish and german Windows 95 and 30GB IBM drive with polish Windows XP. After memory test I'm getting no errors, the the HDD light blinks, heads are reading the data and in the end the computer shows an info about lack of operating system. I'm getting message appropriate to the language of OS on HDD. BIOS in my laptop is obviously english. I think I've got the Phoenix BIOS.

I would like to know if the behaviour that I've just observed proves that my computer doesn't have the HDD whitelist. I don't have any floppy disks for now so I can't check it this way. I also think that it would be impossible to install DOS on different computer because obviously Toshiba sees only 40MB of HDD's capacity.

 

[Stone]

What you have tried with those HDs proves nothing. Those drives aren't even remotely compatible with that system. You need to try a much smaller drive... less than 528 MB to learn anything.

 

[dosstojny]

What you have tried with those HDs proves nothing. Those drives aren't even remotely compatible with that system. You need to try a much smaller drive... less than 528 MB to learn anything.

I'm not planning on using those drives. I wanted to know what should I see if the system couldn't handle anything besides Conner HDDs. I thought that if I can't see any error code and the computer obviously reads the drive, that means the system doesn't have the whitelist and I can buy proper HDD from the era but different brand or just put a CF card in it.

 

[dosstojny]

Thanks for answer. My previous reply is gone, I don't know why.
So what does it mean when the system evidently reads the content of my HDD? I just wanted to know what behaviour should I see plugging HDD into Toshiba with whitelist.
If mine doesn't have one I'll just buy a proper HDD different brand of this computer's era.

 

[SyncByte]

Thanks for answer. My previous reply is gone, I don't know why.
So what does it mean when the system evidently reads the content of my HDD? I just wanted to know what behaviour should I see plugging HDD into Toshiba with whitelist.
If mine doesn't have one I'll just buy a proper HDD different brand of this computer's era.

What it most likely means is that your Toshiba cannot boot from the primary partition on the hard drives you have tried. This is not at all surprising. Assuming there is no data you want on the hard drive, boot the Toshiba using a bootable DOS floppy disk which contains FDISK and FORMAT utilities, then run FDISK to partition the hard drive. The system will prompt you to reboot from the floppy disk for a second time. Then use the FORMAT program to format drive C: with the /S option to copy system files to the HDD. Next restart the machine with floppy disk unloaded and it may boot to your HDD as drive C:

The Toshiba uses cylinder, head and sector addresses to access data which predates the logical block addressing scheme, but even newer HDDs still usually have support for CHS addressing.

 

[dosstojny]

I solved all my problems long time ago so I'll better end the thread with my solution.

The key was to get a proper low capacity hard drive. The perfect match was a 250MB Western Digital IDE Drive with Anydrive installed on it. The HDD controller in Toshiba started to see maximum available capacity of 100MB. I Installed MS-DOS, Windows and everything is working just fine.