The drive in my T4900CT was jammed up as well - I slammed it sideways against my desk to dislodge the motor as it was spinning up and it revived!

The floppy drive on that thing I think has a belt, the one on mine doesn't work either. It detects okay but just makes funny noises when I try to read disks.
Maybe a hard drive image / win32diskimager image from a compact flash with something that the T4900CT can boot with?
My usual solution for these is to put a CF card into a laptop with a working floppy drive, fdisk it, "format /s" and that should then be bootable. From that point, you can copy over the Win95 installation files to get it up and running.

Also, take off the palm rest, around where the laptop hinge is, there's a standby NIMH battery that can (and did on mine) leak onto the PCB, damaging the video card connection. I recommend removing that 😁
The CMOS battery is a little rechargeable lithium battery though, that one's safe.

edit: if you have a working boot drive, use Macrium Reflect or Acronis TrueImage to clone that original drive onto the MSata SSD, that should get things working for you 😀

Use a CF card (2 GB) and a CF to 2.5 inch IDE adapter. Get a USB to CF adapter to transfer files to the card.

But you'll still need a DOS floppy to transfer the system files to the card. And as Thermalwrong said your floppy drive likely has a busted belt. You can buy them on eBay.

Edit: Your mSATA idea would probably work too but you will be limited in the capacity you can use. But you'll never use more than 2 gigs or so with this laptop anyway.

Hi,
I keep coming back to this laptop and have been struggling to get anything on it. I currently have a PATA SSD 16gb partitioned to 4GB on it, but at the moment it's useless as without a working floppy drive i'm unable to do anything!

Does anyone know what model floppy drive I could replace this with? I'm sure I read a post somewhere, where someone bought a USB floppy drive, removed the floppy and installed that, but I can't find the post anymore.

Thanks

Jim

Open up the machine, remove the floppy drive, and search on eBay for the model number. You'll probably find one NOS.

The drive is specific to just mid 90s Toshiba laptops as far as I remember. Sadly I didn't take pictures when I last had mine in pieces, but the belt on mine is bad too, I think it's a Citizen W1D possibly. I printed up some replacement belts which worked on other drives, but the 4900CT's floppy is still bad 😀 It's a lot of fiddly work to replace that belt.

You can do this a different way though, PCMCIA storage is supported in Windows 95 without requiring even a driver disk to set up, so you can use a PCMCIA > Compact Flash adapter and read the CF card via USB to move files around. Much easier than a floppy drive I've found, which is why the 4900CT (still running its original HD) still has a broken floppy drive.