Please help with toshiba 230CX problem. Please.

I'm working with a friend's laptop, an old Toshiba satellite 230CX. It
is turning into the laptop from hell. :))

It is a Pentium 133 with 16 of EDO memory and a 1.35gb hd. The person
who uses it is really poor and doesn't really need to do too much with
it. Someone had installed win98 and on it and it ran like molasses
with that memory. So I suggested reformatting and loading win95b on it
and that I would undertake the project.

First of all, the floppy disc drive does not work, the original one
which came with the laptop. It is recognized but when you place a
floppy in it within Windows, it says it cannot read. I have a dell
floppy drive with com port cable which I hooked up and it performed
exactly the same. It will not boot from the floppy drive either when
I place a bootable floppy in it. So it appears that floppy use is out.

It does have a cd drive though. Using a bootable cd I gained access to
the drdos tools and f-disked and formatted the hard drive. I then
loaded win95 onto the recently formatted drive and typed setup.exe at
the prompt.

The message I receive has been: "Windows Setup requires 'largest
executable program size' to be at least 429856 bytes to run". I
worked on this for hours, reformatting etc, but to no avail. I googled
up support.microsoft.com/kb/q289727/

and read the four suggestions:

o The amount of space on the hard disk has been reported
incorrectly.

Could be, I imagine, but in that case how can I get it to report size
correctly?

o You installed drive overlay software, but you did not follow
the correct installation sequence. For example,
you may have to press the SHIFT key or use a similar keystroke
combination to start your computer when you use a disk.

Nope.

o The computer has a virus.

Did a check with F-prot in Dos. No problems there. Every time I need
to do something, I have to burn a cd (and the cd drive does not
recognize RW discs.


o The computer has failing or faulty hardware.

Could be, I imagine.

The article begins with "The number that is reported may be 4,442,368
or 442,368 bytes".

Slightly different from mine.

Anyway, I am thinking this is a memory problem, but for the life of me
I can't imagine where to go from here. Can someone give me a lead,
please. Pretty please.

thanks, eric

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Boot Floppy
    ... Claus wrote: ... small recovery tool that runs off a floppy I would have a good chance ... The laptop has 512 RAM so even if I could load from several ... The darn thing doesn't support USB CD. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Boot Floppy
    ... off a floppy I would have a good chance to get the files back. ... How the heck did that laptop get built with XP without a CD/DVD ... With GetDataBack (if I ... NTFSDOS Pro is still around or not. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Laptop wont boot -CURRENT after 8/04
    ... but my laptop won't boot any stable past an early BETA of 5.3 ... >Hanging here often relates to floppy drive or floppy disk related ... configuration file that will boot and one that won't. ... >>That would be extremely helpful in narrowing the source of the problem. ...
    (freebsd-current)
  • Re: Word file
    ... > OK, Janice, I'm going to try here... ... > I *think* Autotext is in normal.dot, so here are instructions for that. ... Copy to floppy or CD. ... Using windows explorer, find normal.dot on laptop. ...
    (sci.med.transcription)
  • Re: please help with Toshiba 23oCX problem, please.
    ... > I'm working with a friend's laptop, ... > floppy in it within Windows, ... > Could be, I imagine, but in that case how can I get it to report size ...
    (uk.comp.sys.laptops)