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Help me save a Libretto 20CT

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First post, by Retroplayer

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So, I picked up my first Libretto, a 20CT. It was sold untested, but I got a decent price and it was in good cosmetic condition without any visible screen damage.

It was missing the hard drive, but thankfully still had the bracket and screws. I found the perfect hard drive for it (an old thin 44 pin SSD)

I bought a 2A adapter from Amazon and when trying to use that, the power comes on and the HDD light just blinks steadily. Screen is black. It was beeping previously when I was pressing keys, but now it is not doing that either. I thought it might just be the crappy adapter, so I ordered a genuine Toshiba adapter, but the result is the same.

I have heard that sometimes these just need the bios reflashed from floppy. I have a PCMCIA floppy drive on the way, but I am wondering if others with some experience with these librettos could chime in and give some assistance. First of all, will flashing the bios work automagically from the floppy if I prepare the disk? Where do I find the files to make such a disk? Does the flashing HDD LED tell us anything?

I would like to exhaust all efforts before taking it apart because I know the plastic is going to crumble when I do and it is in such great condition right now.

Lithium battery is obviously dead. I removed the CMOS battery, which was beginning to corrode, but it doesn't look like it made it to the board.

If this were a desktop, I would say it is acting as if it has no bios or no ram, but the ram is soldered to the board. It does have an 8MB RAM expansion, but I removed that and it didn't make a difference.

There is such little information out there for the 20CT. Not sure how much the info for the 50 and 70CT apply to this model.

Any help?

Reply 1 of 3, by nach

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Hi, based on my experience with librettos, they don't use to like the IDE SDDs, and they don't like them specially if are many gb ones. I think the only libretto that accepted my ssd was the libretto 100 if my memory serves me well. I have 2 different IDE SSD and many librettos.

If it turns on but the screen remains off with no life signal i would try a non SDD hard disk or a IDE to CF card adapter to check if it is a different hardware problem or just the bios not liking it.

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Reply 2 of 3, by Retroplayer

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Thank you. The SSD is a a very old 32GB that I partitioned to 8GB. It is very slim like the Libretto needs. I will need to try a CF adapter, but I will need to come up with a method to do that without disassembling the computer. I do not want to do that unless absolutely necessary.

Is it normal that the screen will not turn on without a HDD that it likes? I thought that I had read that it eventually fails and you get a screen showing it search for a floppy drive instead after several seconds.

Last edited by Retroplayer on 2025-09-03, 09:53. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 3 of 3, by Retroplayer

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I got the beeping again. If no hard drive is installed and I remove the 8MB expansion, I press power and the power light comes on solid.

If I give it about a minute and then press the power button like I want to turn it off, I get a long series of beeps and then the power turns off. Screen is black the entire time.

Nothing happens if I press the power button before that minute delay (kind of like it is going through POST and hardware detection).

If it matters:
One long beep and long pause then 29 evenly spaced beeps before it shuts off. Seems like a normal warning that the system is going to power off.

This makes me believe that the BIOS and main hardware are fine. The LCD might just be completely dead. I did try to use a flashlight to see if maybe the backlight was dead, but I am not seeing anything coming up on the screen.

Sigh. As soon as I start taking this apart, I know the whole thing is going to begin to crumble. I will say that I doubt I will buy a libretto again. The asking prices are really high and even if you spend a mint to get a nice one, it is going to fall apart and look like crap no matter how much you spend on one. The cost can't be justified.

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