duvalj@bionette.CGRB.ORST.EDU (Joe Duval) (11/22/90)
Hi, I have a Toshiba T5100 with 4Megs of RAM, and a 40Meg hard drive. We just got it back from another site and they told us it was working fine but..... The machine would not boot from the hard drive. It would boot fine from the floppy drive. I first tried to run SYS C:. Not enough room. Then I tried to format the drive (format c: /s). It started to format it but was going very slow. I then ran Spinrite on the thing and it went very slow as well Spinrite was going to take something like 4 days to finish (on a 32Meg partition). I stopped that and decided to start completely over. I ran FDISK and cleared all of the partitions. Then I recreated the partitions and ran FDISK again. By now the machine would not even recognize the hard disk. The FDISK command would report that there were no fixed disks present. Coming back to the machine two weeks later, I tried again. Fdisk ran fine and so did the format command. I then ran Norton's Disk Doctor and it flew right through both drives. As a final test I was going to run Spinrite. I ran spinrite and let it go over night. When I came back there was a divide by zero error scrolling by on the machine. I Ctrl-Alt-Deleted the machine and it booted fine. I left the machine on all day but didn't do anything to it I turned it off that night and when I started it up the next day and to this day still, all I get is an ERROR INITIALIZING HARD DRIVE. Then I must boot from the floppy and have not been able to communicate with the hard drive since. This was kind of lengthy but does anyone have any other ideas? Is this a common problem with these machines? Anyone else have this problem? I do feel quite capable around a standard cased PC, but after just getting the cover off of this portable I don't know if I want to go any further. Thanks for all the help. -- Joe Duval duvalj@bionette.cgrb.orst.edu Don't stand too close to people who are always bandaged up.