Twins!: Continuing to experiment with the T1850

UPDATED: Both of these are for sale. I was unable to convince the hard drive controller to recognize the drives on boot because they’re empty. If you can find another computer to write a boot sector, go ahead! Includes two units and good hard drives. Shoot me a contact if you want them.

I have my two Toshiba T1850s today. I have splayed them open and dissected them, but I have run into some issues (expectedly…).

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I have two computers, both with Hard Disk Controller issues. The first computer appears to have issues dealing with hard drives in general. I originally thought this to be a hard drive issue, but apparently I have two good hard drives and two bad hard drive controllers.

Laptop 1 boots properly to the DOS install but can’t find the disk. It doesn’t recognize the hard drive in Bios (but if you press the spacebar while the “no hard drive” selection is highlighted, it correctly displays the capacity). I cannot get anything to recognize the hard drive.

The second T1850 displays HDC ERROR when reading the hard drive during the initial self test.. This unit recognizes the hard drive correctly in BIOS but the DOS setup still does not see a hard drive.

According to online forum posts such as this one, it appears I have a problem (a catch 22, if you will). The hard drive controller sees the blank drive and flips out, throwing an HDC ERROR message and shutting off. The proposed fix is to put the drive into another computer and then format, however I don’t have another computer with the IBM PC/AT bus (or IDE / AT).

It looks like I’m somewhat stuck. I’ve been able to create a DOS boot floppy and boot with it, but it’s next to useless at the moment. If anyone has suggestions feel free to chime in!

Toshiba T1850: The Land Before Windows

One of my hobbies is Radios. It covers everything from building your own radios with a soldering iron to collecting old police radios and reprogramming them for your own use. It’s pretty fun. Keeps the nerds busy. However, as you dig deeper and deeper into the radio hobby, you will undoubtedly unearth some of the older radios. When the cops upgrade, they dump massive quantities of (for the most part, excellent) radios onto auction sites like eBay. Hams and other radio gurus sweep them up in great quantities. Until you find out one particularly sad fact: you need DOS to program them. And often, the slower the better. More on radios elsewhere, today we cover the DOSmonster.

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