On 22 Jun 2003 at 2:20, Heimo Claasen wrote:
>Maybe all what follows is "firmware" specific. So please pardon (but
>there's no hope to get enlightenment from Toshiba.)
>
>I have a tricky problem with a Toshiba "Satellite 300" laptop when it
>comes to run a clean (DR-)DOS on it. The unit had a "native" Windonos-98
>"SE" on it (forget for the moment the proposterous "Second Edition"
>needed to make it run at all). I never succeeded to have it run a
>really "clean" (DR-)Dos from booting from the built-in HD - the best
>compromise was to boot from floppy, with most of the DOS files indeed
>sitting on the built-in HD (on a, rightly, DOS-fdisk-created
>"extended" partition; as Win$ doesn't want to allow the "primary" C:
>drive for this).
>
>But with some of the DOS applications, "something" interferes especially
>when using (some of) the ALT-Fx keys. Which makes indeed number of
>DOS-apps unusable (vulgo, crashing.)
>
>I have a Linux (Mandrake) installed on it too which runs rather
>satisfactory (it never managed the built-in sound though yet); booting -
>with LiLo - either into this or into Win$ did/does work as advertised,
>but not into DOS (thus the floppy.) Running it in Linux, I never had
>trouble with just any of the F-keys, directly or however switched (with
>any of the SHIFT/ALT/CTRL-combinations).
>
>What I never did (yet) was to really hard-(re)format the the _whole_
>thing, i.e. its HD. Reason for this hesitation is that I'm not sure if
>the trouble with the (firmware?) key bindings would really be gone then.
Dear Heimo,
I suspect this is a problem related to the Toshiba BIOS and DR-DOS. I
would suggest the following:
1) boot from MS-DOS 5 or 6 diskette and see if the problem happens
2) boot from DR-DOS diskette and see if the problem happens
I will guess that the problem will occur with 2) and might occur with
1), due to some funky BIOS code.
I doubt that repartitioning and formatting the drive will make any
difference, unless you've got some oddity like having MS-DOS boot
sector code installed on the hard drive, which loads the DR-DOS
COMMAND.COM, but I expect this to be unlikely in the extreme. Booting
from floppy should be able to tell you, though, if it's DR-DOS, or the
BIOS that's causing problems.
Hope this helps,
Anthony J. Albert
===========================================================
Anthony J. Albert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
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