TOSHIBA SATELLITE PRO

[jessaroo_y2k]

Greetings fellow PC Guru's....

I have an ancient Toshiba Satellite Pro (mod 420 CDT) with a whopping 1358mb hard drive and I'm thinking 32 to 64mb's ram. I need it only for one simple dos pg for my studies. I can get it to C: prompt but it does not recognize any dos commands nor any drive letters and just asks for a system boot disk over and over. Bios doesn't respond nicely either. I'm thinking two different things here; 1) a bad CMOS battery or 2) a bug in the hard drive. My question is where is the CMOS located on this dinosaur. If there is a bug in the hard drive and I take it out and take a peek in it through my desktop mite I catch the same bug? I have several old drives around and I could just disconnect my good OS HD's and boot a DOS mirror to it and take a look see that way. I'm almost sure that CMOS is dead as a hammer and needs replacing. I've broken the unit down to a point, but it doesn't want to come apart that easy and a nagging part of me wonders is there is or is not a CMOS in this particular model...and if so why so hard to replace them? (Other than the obvious!) Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Pointertovoid]

It certainly has a Cmos Ram, which you shouldn't replace.

It also has a battery for the Cmos Ram. If the clock settings stay right from one day to the next then keep the battery. If not, replace it with the same model, something like CR2032. However, some laptops have the battery soldered directly on the printed circuit, so you'll need a soldering iron to replace the battery.

Can you boot on a Win98 floppy? This will give you Dos commands.

Then, having spare Hdd, you can copy all boot (special commands for that) and system files from the floppy to the Hdd, allowing you to have a swift Dos on this computer.