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  #1  
Old June 7th, 2008, 04:33 PM
xgurl213 xgurl213 is offline
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HELP! Really old laptop won't give me BIOS screen

A friend of mine told me she needed a computer she'd been given wiped and set up again. What she did not tell me until I saw the thing, was that it's a 1996 Toshiba Tecra 500CDT laptop. And what I didn't realize till after the fact is that this thing does not boot from a CD. So I deleted and re-created the partition drive, effectively wiping all the info...and now I can't get the damn thing to do anything. The BIOS screen doesn't even come up, so I don't know how to get into the set up menu to tell it to boot from a floppy.
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Old June 9th, 2008, 01:34 AM
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zipulrich zipulrich is offline
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Press the escape [Esc] key while the laptop is powering up, then (if & when requested) press the F1 key.
Not having an antique like that to mess with, that's the best I could come up with using a Google search and about 1.4 minutes of my time. There are also updated BIOS's you can nab, and even a way to boot from USB. Just need to search a little.
And, welcome to CTH.
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Old June 9th, 2008, 01:39 AM
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renegade600 renegade600 is offline
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if its that old, the bios battery may also be bad. One thing though, you should not have to tell it to boot from a floppy. It should already do it since booting from cd is more recent.
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Old June 9th, 2008, 09:05 AM
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smurfy smurfy is offline
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Just booted up my 2520CDS (little more recent but not by much) and it's default boot sequence is CD-HDD-FDD so older models without CD are probably HDD-FDD.
Zip's googled (ESC) then F1 is the correct sequence, although you really need to be holding down (esc) as you turn the power on, as it's prone to missing the signal otherwise.
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Old June 9th, 2008, 11:08 PM
ggross ggross is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by renegade600 View Post
if its that old, the bios battery may also be bad. One thing though, you should not have to tell it to boot from a floppy. It should already do it since booting from cd is more recent.
ive only seen one dead BIOS battery in my lifetime!! course then again I usually dont let my system get more than three years old :-/
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  #6  
Old June 11th, 2008, 01:41 PM
hrd_drvr hrd_drvr is offline
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How many partitions did you delete? Sometimes there are settings or a utility that are on an extremely small partition. You can probably find it online, download, and configure it again. I admit, I've deleted it before thinking it was a waste of space. :-P
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