Toshiba T3100/20 Repair

So I ended up having two of these units. So one that sat at home was waiting for me to work on it as it seemed to boot but had a fulty display. It would only show garbage, but the garbage looked like it was at least trying to boot.

However due to COVID they were closing down my office I was stationed in, it was in London. Had to make two trips to pick everything up, the station staff were really good on helping me load & unload it from the train. One of the things in my pile of shit at the office was a T3100/20 laptop I had got off eBay & completly forgot existed. This parked me with exsitment. It was missing parts so I was unable to power it up as one of the parts was just a tiny bit needed to boot it up, the PSU. But it had parts such as a HDD & whatnot.

So I bagged it all up & took it home in the first batch of stuff that I packed up in some boxes I found in the office for peoples stuff. I even had one of the boxes colapse & fall back down the stairs at the station, someone helped me with that one.

The keybaord was pulled to be used in another project at a latwer date from the parts unit. The other thing was the display cable hasd been physicaly cut making it harder to get working as I did not know its pinout. So the parts unit would be partd out to get the othet one working.

The main thing that needed swapping was the display. Once the display transplant was complete it worked perfictly, maybe one day I will fix the other panel & find out if the other motherboard works.

After playing with the HDD & it not working I then moved onto putting two FDDs in the machine which was an option for these machine back in the 80s. However no matter how I configued the machine it never did accept the second FDD which was & still is anoying. I might need to change a jumper setting on the drive at some point.

Luckily the disk that came with the working machine was still readable, despite the lack of an ability to boot properly. This was important as t is the only way of configering the BIOS. This was a common trait on these vintae machines, although some of them did have a BISO you would enter on boot from spamming the keyboard. It's an old tradition these days.

The other thing this neded was a new BIOS battery, the original one was thankfuly a Lithium one, so no leakage. I charged up an 18650, soldered the old battery wires to it & hey presto I have a working BIOS battery in the computer again. Turns out the 4.2V was not a problem, most of this old logic is 5V anyway. The battery has been in the laptop for over a year, clost to two years now.

With the main OS disk being fulty & it not working with the second FDD & the HDD being dead. I needed a new OS disk. Lucily for my IBM 5150 restore I bought some 80s IBM MSDOS 3.3 disks. So I took the 720KB disk & then proceeded to copy a backup disk with the included software as they recomended backing up your disks in the 80s. So I did that.

After that I did the pain stakeing provccess of copying the custoom Toshiba software over to the newly created OS disk for the machine.