configuration woes

Greetings!

I have a 2805-S201 that is in mint condition - except for a crack in the original configuration disc that runs about half and inch in from the edge. The drive didn't notice it, unfortunately, until it had already wiped the harddrive during a reconfiguration. It stops dead - every time. I tried it one hundred times before hurling it against the basement wall. They disintegrate pretty spectacularly against concrete!

I had no idea what a nightmare it would be trying to put a fresh install on.
Naturally, (no doubt many of you already know this) Toshiba told me on the phone that they could be of absolutely no help. A five year old laptop being apparently, in modern timescale, as obsolescent as a vacuum-tube calculator.

I went through the stack of accumulated various cd's in my desk and found versions of WinMe and Win98. I wiped the drive clean - floppy rebooted - FDisked it up to snuff and proceeded with the ME install. I finall got to a screen that required me "for verification" to insert the "operating system disc that came with your original computer". Yeah that one. The one that was so unreadable in the first place (not to mention now in thousands of shards) is now supposed to be my key to a fresh install. Nice touch Microsoft!

I redid all the clean and prep and tried Win98. All good. I downloaded drivers from toshiba for Win98 on this model and kept plugging on. I had to resize the screen each time I turned the machine on, it wouldn't save my settings. The only available sound driver kept telling me I must have Win98SE on my machine - so audio is out.

The Modem, (I have broadband and dial-up in the house - this older laptop is for dial-up only - don't ask) using the driver off of toshibas site seems only to recieve strings of data on the screen at about one tenth of the 56k connection speed printed on the card. I'm reasonably sure that this is a result of this half assed fresh install.

What can I do? Is this computer worthless now? Is there ANY way to get my hands on a copy of the original config CD? I started to take the opportunity this offered to learn how to put a friendly version of Linux on a machine. I found a couple of tutorials regarding this and each one looked like about a solid 40hr workweek of hair-pulling keyboard calisthenics to pull off. I've lost enough hair in the past two days. No thanks - for now anyway.

Any advice out there?
Thanks so very much.

 

First of all, I don't think your problems are because of a "half assed fresh install". It's kind of hard to do that. I mean you either install the OS the right way and it works, or u don't install it the right way and then it simply doesn't work. There's no in between.

Second, this might be a driver problem, not something to do with the actual install of the OS.

Thirdly, why don't you buy an external wireless or lan card? Either thru the pcmcia slot or usb. That way you can use you house's broadband connection instead of the dial-up.

 

Yes, it is a driver problem. The drivers that Toshiba recommends with this install are not working. Do you think that I'd have better luck identifying the actual hardware integrated into my laptop and go searching for the appropriate drivers on my own? This sounds like double the headache.

I respectfully must disagree that an install is either a go or no-go proposition. It DID install - but not without having to go back and clean up some of my FDISK commands in DOS. I'm not that good at this. The room for error on my part is pretty wide. Connecting to my broadband with a wireless card is the very least of my concerns right now. If I can get this thing functioning reasonably well, that part will be a snap.

I only mentioned the modem as one more example of the screwed up installation. It's without a doubt the right driver. I'm using a 3com pcmcia modem since the original minipci died on me years ago. Modem worked in ME. It won't work with the Win98 driver I downloaded from USRobotics/3com.
This is a nightmare any way you slice it. Does ANYONE know a source for the original CONFIGURATION CDs?

 

I found a cd-r in my desk drawer labelled "2805 configuration" that I evidently burned from the original 2805 series configuration cd years ago and forgot about. I opened it on the desktop of another computer and everything was there. Yay! I put it in the 2805 and nothing. I called a friend and he said that I must not have burned it as a "bootable cd".

He said I should be able to use this one to burn another "bootable" cd. I spent the last couple of hours trying to figure out how to do this. I even used my winME boot floppy in the 2805 and that enabled me to get to DOS commands. I did a DIR on the D drive and found all of the files on my disc. I changed the command line to D and typed install.exe just as it appeard in the directory. It said that "this program cannot be run in DOS". I'm soooooo close. What am I doing wrong?

Is this way beyond a novice?