Toshiba Portege 3490CT Laptop Problems

[bcni]

I picked up a Toshiba Portege 3490CT laptop recently with a PCMCIA CD ROM drive and no operating system and was interested in trying to make it work. It’s only a P3 700 with 128 MB RAM and a 20 GB HD so it’s pretty ordinary and XP will be pretty slow. The operating manual isn’t very helpful as far as setting it up goes as it would have come with Windows preinstalled. However I have struck a few problems which, if anyone has the answers, it would be appreciated. It is designed for a USB floppy which didn’t come with it, but it looks like it can boot from this drive. Is any old USB floppy OK or does it have to be a Toshiba? Similarly I have always assumed all laptop hard drives are interchangeable and have installed various brands in laptops. Is this assumption true? I eventually figured out how to get into the BIOS and can boot from the external CD. However, when the XP installation gets to “Starting Windows” I get the blue screen of death with BOOT DISK INACCESSIBLE. I thought the HD was stuffed so I replaced it with a 40 GB Seagate to no avail. I can boot from the restore CD but it seems to be looking for another CD. The CD ROM is drive A: which is interesting. Could this be the reason for XP not installing? Would plugging in a USB floppy force the CD to be drive D: which could make the XP installation happier? If anyone has any suggestions it would be appreciated.

[3XX]

I would install the operating system on to the HD man. In bios select it as the boot drive at the top of the list. Insert Windows Disc and install. You are Prolly running into problems with not having the drivers on there for the cd rom or the floppy. try install xp or 2000 on to the HD ?

[z80]

The hard drive is a 3.5 volt model.

In order to use it with a replacement drive and force it into 3.5 volt mode you need to cut a pin on the ide connector.

A bootable cd presents itself as drive a: normally.

you don't need a Toshiba floppy, any usb floppy will work.


Your best bet is to install xp on the original hard drive via a notebook to ide adapter, they cost about $5.
use a normal desktop until after the second reboot then put drive back in laptop and continue the install.

They are a great machine, in spite of the specs, it will perform adequately for email, surfing and word etc.

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