[Solved] Nostalgic Win2000 Quest needs Directions

Hello,

Am midway through a nostalgic quest to revive a little Toshiba Dynabook SS Portege 3000CT and would appreciate some good advice about how to go about it.

When I turn it on I get the Toshiba flashscreen "In Touch with Tomorrow" (though in this case should probably say in touch with yesterday :-) - I can enter and exit the system setup via the F1 key that is also encouraging. But after that I get the message "IDE #0 error" Insert system disk in drive. Press any key when ready

Unfortunately I do not have the portable floppy drive that came with this system that I think is necessary for inserting the system disk whatever that means. That is the bad news.

The good news is that I have removed and tested the original super powerful 2.1 GB (no not kidding) IDE HD via an ide-usb connector on another x64 Win7 laptop and the HD seems to be working ok, as the computer finds this HD that starts spinning as expected. However the x64 Win7 laptop does not recognise the Dynabook's 2.1GB HD and just asks if I want to initialise it - that would wipe all the files off the HD, right?

I also have a bootable Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional CD that should work with this Dynabook that has an MMX processor and is a Windows 98/NT machine. But the Dynabook doesn't have a CD player.

So here are my questions:

(1) Given the above is it not likely that the main problem could be the boot-up files on the HD are corrupted and need to be reinstalled?

(2) Should I go ahead and initalise the 2.1GB HD on the x64 Win7 laptop so I can check the disk is working, reformat the HD and reinstall the system files - or would this be a dumb move?

(3) If I do re-initialise the 2.1 GB HD in what format should I reformat it?

(4) Is there any way I can install the files from the bootable Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional CD on the re-initalised 2.1GB HD so that it boots up and opens Win2000?

Regards,

Lowep

Sounds like the drive may be bad, get a new drive for the thing, or try to format the one you have for it. And yes formatting the drive will wipe the data, although initializing should not, depending on exactly what it means by that. It should tell you if it's about to delete anything off the drive, but looks like it may not be able to read it anyway, in which case it will try to format it so it can.

Go to the vendor support site for whoever made the drive, they should have a low-level disk check utility. Just because the drive is seen as a drive, and gets power, does not mean the drive is usable. Take out the heating coil of an oven. It will power up, lights go on, dings.. no heat.

From how things sound, your best bet is to find another drive to try. Laptop is old enough that a dead drive is very likely.

Does it have USB? And an option to boot to that in the BIOS? You can make a Linux boot disk to install on the new drive using a USB flash disk.

You need to get something to install an OS on the laptop, using another computer to install Windows causes lots of issues, many times it does not even boot.

External CD drive, probably a parallel port one with DOS based drivers to boot from, or a CD drive for the bay (can probably replace the floppy if it's a modular bay).

Best answer selected by lowep.