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Toshiba T5100: installing DOS 6.22 & BIOS help

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First post, by ifkz

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So, I got the Toshiba gas-plasma bug a few months ago with my earlier T3100; this T5100 came from ebay with a dead hard drive, now replaced with a much later 6GB IDE WD drive.

First off, I am unsure of the proper BIOS setup. The system was upgraded and comes with 4096KB of RAM, enough to possibly run Doom, though this is a 386 SX 16Mhz CPU. I am sure it will run Wolf 3D just fine and that's my first gaming goal.
I have Hard Disk Type options of 6, 7,8, & 9. I selected 9 which is 100MB.
Memory Size defaults:
System: 640KB
Extended: 0MB
Expanded: 3MB + 256KB fast boot

I can change these values around
System: 640KB
Extended: .5MB, 1MB, 1.5MB, 2MB, 2.5MB, & 3MB (+384KB)
Expanded: 0MB + (384KB)

Memory settings are auto detected on my other hardware, so I am a bit lost.

Secondly, booting from a DOS 6.22 boot floppy, using fdisk the normal way, formatting everything works fine. My problem is at the end of the installation, it attempts to write COMMAND.COM and errors out. An fdisk, format c: /s finishes fine but refuses to boot to C:\> at a cold start. The partition is startable, of course.

Is the answer a drive overlay? I have had bad luck with these (I remember ruining a hard disk with one in the late 1990's), but if it is the only solution I'll risk it. Any tutorials?

Reply 1 of 2, by ifkz

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Reading here:
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue13 … dible_expan.php
it seems I want to move everything possible to Extended Memory and let DOS's EMM386.exe and HIMEM take care of everything from there, just like I am used to doing. Great!

I picked EZ-Drive from Phil's Computer lab as my drive overlay and I got it to correctly boot to DOS after a standard three disk installation. Whew! I do notice that running dir/w from the root of C:>\ results in gibberish...odd! Obtaining and installing shareware Wolf 3-D complains there is no VGA card, so that is my next problem to work on.

Reply 2 of 2, by torindkflt

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ifkz wrote:

...Wolf 3-D complains there is no VGA card, so that is my next problem to work on.

This is because the T5100 is EGA only, not VGA. I'm not familiar with Wolf 3D, so I don't know if there is an EGA version available or not.

As for the problems you're having with the hard drive...most Toshiba portables from the time period are designed to work only with Conner-branded hard drives, specifically models that start with "CP". I know my T5200 outright refused to work with any other brand of drive regardless of capacity, so I had to order a 40MB Conner CP drive from eBay. I would imagine the T5100 to have the same limitation as well, but since my T5100 arrived in working condition I haven't had need or opportunity to test this.

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