i have a 460cdt and when i bought it a couple years ago, it had a dead cdrom
but my floppy drive works. Not all cdroms work as i remember i tried other brands and it just never continued the booting process.
i also bought a second external floppy drive from another toshiba model and it works perfectly

maybe you need to clean the floppy drive with one of those floppys that are white inside and you put liquid.
or maybe the floppy you are trying to read is just too old. or maybe some capacitors from inside the floppy drive need to be replaced.

kept mine with windows 3.11 tho. But to be honest you don´t really need the floppy nor the cdrom, cf or sd to ide is better.

my toshiba started to show a defect, blue line on the screen.
so i bought a replacement screen. So now looks perfect.
but i bought a 3rd replacement screen just in case, and it brand new and whites have a yellowish tint.

so to be honest, i don´t use it much, old notebooks give too many problems. I love old desktops with a good CRT

ALSO you better hurry up and open that toshiba because it has green batteries in 2 sections that start to leak and ruin the motherboard. I can tell you this because i opened mine and corrosion went from the battery to the cables ..to the connector of the battery.

and a big plus, when i checked the motherboard i saw they had solid capacitors, but because of age, or heat or whatever,they look a little bit bulging

too many problems , i know they look awesome but too many problems

I just have a hard time believing that I bought three non working floppies 🤣. I tried multiple disks that work fine in other drives. The drives I am using are genuine Toshiba drives. I have already removed the resume battery and I replaced the CMOS battery with a new one from online! Maybe I should ship you my floppy drives for you to test 🤣. I'll try and get a cleaner and see how that goes I guess?

Do the drives give you a read error then, or does the laptop just plain not recognize the drive to begin with?
Remember that the floppy disks themselves have a failure rate of, like, 80%, so make sure that you have lots of disks to test too.

Lastly, as long as you have a working CF, you don't really need the floppy drive for anything. If you are just looking to boot and do a fresh install of Windows or DOS, you can do that with a USB-IDE interface!

It recognized the drives busy gives errors with reading them. Same with the diagnostic program from Toshiba. It will give errors booting from them or even trying to read from them in Windows. I need to take them apart and inspect them I guess. I know the disks are all good. I have used them before and after on multiple other computers. I really wanted the floppy drive for writing disk images to disks. And the CD-ROM drive to prevent having to mess with mounting isos and taking up tons of space on the 2gb drive.

And yeah, to install Windows I had to open up another machine and partition and format the drive and hook it up to a newer machine to copy Windows setup files. I guess I just prefer a fully working system. But I hate to keep buying drives if it's the computer and not the drives. Just didn't know if it was common to have an issue with either the drives or computer itself.

Hm, I understand wanting the drives to "just work". However, using a CF would also make the CD-Rom obsolete because you'd have enough room for disk images.

I can't tell you anything about the Toshiba disk drives, because I don't have one for my Satellite/Tecra. The CD-Drives are Toshiba made 10x and I understand you need this exact drive to work in Toshiba laptops from that generation. It is possible (though very bad luck) to get 3 drives with bad or misaligned heads, I suppose 😒

Depending on where you live, Toshiba laptops are relatively easy to get with a little patience. Maybe rather invest in one that is in working condition or can be cannibalized for parts?

I hope opening up the drives and carefully cleaning the heads and greasing the drive rails will solve your problem!