Bios

Hi there, Im needing some help with booting windows to my toughbook CF 28.
I have a genuine windows 2000 disc, but it dose not for some reason want to boot! I have changed the boot options in the BIOS to CD first, the cd drive seems to spin for a while but nothing happens apart from a screen just before the windows screen that has a flashing cursor - - - and then it just boots up normaly from the hard drive. The computer dose not promt me to press any buttons to boot from the cd, I was just wandering if I was doing something wrong... Many thanks,

 

The drive may have been swapped in the cd caddy. The drive itself is probably set to slave and Toughbooks will not boot an optical drive set to slave.

Optical drive mod

 

woops ....

 

You did notice he is working on a CF 28?

 

Where did the post go? I'm not losing my mind again? Am I?
I got this brain from a guy named Abby Normal

 

Ok your fast...damn. Thought I might of got it off before anyone noticed

 

If you go into my computer / system / device manager what does it give you for a model number of your cd-rom ....mine is a Teac CD-224E

 

This is it, I cant load up the machine because I have lost the administrative password... so a full reinstall is needed. the model no. is CF VCD281

 

ok... now I understand. I just had this same problem here http://www.toughbooktalk.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1188&p=8803#p8803

 

thank you for the link. I put that on a cd, but again it would just not boot up from it, how strange...

 

Inside the vcd281 is the actual drive. Check device manager for the real model, or loosen the two screws on the top of the cd caddy and read the label.
I'll bet a broken cf50 that someone has changed the drive. The replacement is cable select or slave and not master. Toughbooks will not boot from any cd until this is repaired.

Click on the following link
Optical drive mod

 

I think it is down to the CD drive, I'll probably have to bight the bullet an get anouther one, not such a bad price on Ebay.

 

Check out the picture of mine ...this is what is inside my media bay case. You really need to take yours apart or check device manager and get back to us on your model number. My guess someone else upgraded it and did not know what they were doing

 

You may end up buying the same problem. Try asking in the buy sell trade section of this forum.
A fellow member can make sure the replacement drive is set to master. Or ship your drive to be modded if you are not comfortable with modding it.

 

I have taken mine apart. and these are the numbers
model ver. C27
part no. 1977047C-27
serial no. 3921150

 

Looks like a HP COMPAQ drive, I would do the set to master mod to it. I have done two so far when I dropped a DVD drive in place of the original CD drive.

 

It is a Teac CD-224E.
It may be the original drive. They used that model in many laptops though.
Did the cd drive work in windows before the problem?
With the master/slave issue the drive will work in windows but it won't boot from it.

 

OK someone has put another one in it so you need to do the mod to it or someone here might have one. try putting. a wanted to buy add in the BST thread.

 

If you do do the mod, go ahead and find a dvd drive and upgrade it while you are at it.

 

sebvp, Have you tried disabling all boot options except the CD drive and then booting from the the win 2000 Disk?

 

I will write this up to describe what is up and why the mod needs to be done. Other people may not click on the links and thus won't have all the information.
Toughbooks are different from other laptops in that the cd/dvd MUST be set to master for it to be bootable. Some optical drives can be changed through a bios upgrade. Most of them you can't find the master bios on the net.
In this case, we have to force it to be master by soldering pins 47 and 45 together. In some Toughbooks, you can do this easily by soldering two points on the caddy pcb.
I have seen his symptoms in every cable select optical drive I ever put in a Toughbook. I always try any used drive I buy. Once in a great while I get lucky and don't need to do the mod.
It DOES NOT matter if it is a Panasonic brand drive or not. It matters how the company that originally ordered the drive wanted it configured. Every Panasonic drive that I have used that came from an Apple needed to be soldered. One other company uses optical drives that are set to master. I can't remember which company it is. It may be Toshiba, but that is a SWAG.
Sophisticated Wild A-- Guess.

 

Are you sure Windows 2000 comes as a bootable CD. I have a genuine 2000 CD and it does NOT boot. To install 2000 get a floppy drive, load DOS, SYS C:\ load MSCDEX CD ROM drivers for your CDROM and xcopy content of your CD into a subfolder on your HDD. Run SETUP.EXE from there.

 

Now there's an idea I had not even considered.
Bravo

 

Well actually, once you've booted with active CDROM device drivers and assigned a drive letter to MSCDEX.EXE, you can run SETUP.EXE from the CDROM drive. It's a lot faster because it loads a better Memory Manager into memory first, which dramatically speeds up the copy process.

mnem
Suck my DOS.