Early Atapi had its struggles https://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-secret-history-of-atapi/, but 20x drive is anything but early.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-09-12, 07:09:

Early Atapi had its struggles https://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-secret-history-of-atapi/, but 20x drive is anything but early.

Thank you for this resource. The described ATAPI history is interesting. However it seems that in 1993/1994 the specification was established. My drives from Toshiba laptops are from 1997/1998. I think that until then specification should be quite mature.

However, maybe I should dig for more information about version of ATAPI specification supported by each driver.

Again, thank you!

As a supplement to my initial post.

After I install the ATAPI drive that is not detected. Laptop stays a long time on the initial screen:

Then after a couple of minutes I could enter the bios (if I press ESC-F1) and BIOS settings looks as follows:

There is not much to change and in BIOS drive is visible... If I do not connect any drive then there is no secondary IDE.

However, as described initially - drive do not work.

Update:

I have checked what will happen on Toshiba Tecra 750CDT and I get „HDC Error”. After that computer starts but CD-ROM is not detected.

From what I have learnt over the Internet, HDC stands for Hard Drive Controler. However, I cannot find what I could do to make these CD-ROMs work/detect.

I dont know what could have changed between 20x ~1998 drives and >2000 ones. It looks like they are connected to separate IDE port too, so there should be no master/slave/cable select conflicts. Edit: oh how wrong I was, and how would Toshiba screw such simple thing up?

I had similar experience with a Compaq laptop; no matter what CD/DVD-drive I tried to replace the original drive with none of them would be recognized properly. 🙁

Maybe there is a whitelist in bios after all. If you upload a dump someone should be able to find it (Im not promising anything).

I tried to replace the driver on my Satellite 4030, without success. In that computer, the optical drive was undetected (but was able to boot).

Somewhere I read that the drive MUST be configured as slave, but those drives have no jumpers so it must be done at firmware level. There was some utilities that would allow you to change the drive configuration... but you must find the exact utility for your drive (not all drives had that utilities available).

So, in the end, I had to:
- Check if a drive could be configured before buying it.
- Locate the utility to do so.
- Pray that nothing went wrong when I change the configuration.

So I left the old drive installed on my computer. Not a happy ending, but I was being tired of looking for drives.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-09-18, 00:19:

Maybe there is a whitelist in bios after all. If you upload a dump someone should be able to find it (Im not promising anything).

At this moment I do not have such dumps, but I have the BIOS updates from the official Dynabook support (I have downloaded them when they were available).

4750tb72 and 4750tv66 - BIOS for 750CDT
2480cv66 and 2480cv69 - BIOS for 470CDT

If anyone have an idea how to get such a list of compatible devices it would be very useful for retro-toshiba laptop community 😀

Zup wrote on 2023-09-18, 04:48:

I tried to replace the driver on my Satellite 4030, without success. In that computer, the optical drive was undetected (but was […]
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I tried to replace the driver on my Satellite 4030, without success. In that computer, the optical drive was undetected (but was able to boot).

Somewhere I read that the drive MUST be configured as slave, but those drives have no jumpers so it must be done at firmware level. There was some utilities that would allow you to change the drive configuration... but you must find the exact utility for your drive (not all drives had that utilities available).

So, in the end, I had to:
- Check if a drive could be configured before buying it.
- Locate the utility to do so.
- Pray that nothing went wrong when I change the configuration.

So I left the old drive installed on my computer. Not a happy ending, but I was being tired of looking for drives.

Thank you, that was a helpful clue 😀
BTW OP I'm sorry for sending you off on a wild goose chase but this is solvable and not specific to a type of drive, I was initially going to say it's a limitation of the ACPI bios they were using, maybe it would only boot from CD with known drives. But that wasn't it after all.

I remembered from going through some drive fixing recently that one of my CD-ROM drives has a Master/Slave/CableSelect switch on it:

So with this SR-8171, I tried each position on a Satellite 230CX:
Master = works perfectly
Slave = stops for several minutes and boots into OS with no CD-ROM drive
Cable select = stops for a minute and boots into OS with no CD-ROM drive
It was in my box of spares since it didn't want to read CDs reliably in the PCMCIA caddy it used to be in. Seems to work well in the Toshiba Satellite 230CX though, must be that it needs more power than that caddy can give.
If you can get a drive that has a switch to select "Master" then you'll have a drive that will work with most Toshiba laptops. Looks like the Matsushita or Panasonic SR-8175 also has this switch.

How on earth I avoided this problem a few years back I don't know, I put a random drive onto the connector for a Tecra 8000 because I couldn't get a drive/caddy for it and the drive worked first time, no errors. Can't find that laptop though so can't check which drive it was.

Knowing that Toshibas only like drives in Master mode, I checked groups.google.com / newsgroup archives because that's an awesome resource for old information - lots of what is no longer on the web is referenced or boiled down on here. It turned up this: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.laptops/ … /m/ngFcSFzAJk4J
And this longer thread: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.laptops/ … /m/5DEanEMLPXMJ
There's this page linked which as of 2023 is still live, but I don't like the method: http://www.dschen.de/laptop_brenner/

I checked if CSEL on the 50-pin JAE connector for the drive's caddy connector goes to anything, it does not. So there's a comparatively easy to perform fix for this, bridge pin 45 and 47 on the caddy PCB's CD-ROM connector, which forces the drive to operate as Master.
Note the orientation:

Zoom in on this, just put a dab of solder on the soldering iron and carefully touch the two pins 45 and 47 shown here. It doesn't really need magnification to connect these, it's around 2mm in size.

Make sure only those two pins are bridged and put the caddy back together. Here I'm testing it with a slot DVD-RW drive from an iMac - the computer booted straight up into Windows and reads CDs without issue:

Good luck with getting your drives working 😀 With this modification, any drive can be installed into the caddy and should work with all Toshiba laptops with the matching caddy type.

Looks like some of the LG drives have this secret switch too! CRN-8241 and CRN-8245 both appear to have that switch

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-09-18, 13:43:

Good luck with getting your drives working 😀 With this modification, any drive can be installed into the caddy and should work with all Toshiba laptops with the matching caddy type.

Thank you!

Your solution works!

I have just find-out that one of my LG drives has this switch. It was hidden under the sticker.

That's great news 😀 I do think the drives with the switch setting are the easiest option.

A note of caution too, if doing the solder CSEL > Master modification - I put the original Toshiba's Teac CD-220EA drive back into the caddy with pin 45 & 47 still connected on the caddy PCB, now the drive doesn't work somehow. So if doing the solder mod, avoid connecting an original working drive to that.

edit: update - the modded PCB being connected to the drive did no damage, just the drive's firmware is set up to do the opposite of what the CSEL jumper normally does. Jumpering it for slave = master, jumpering for master (which the solder bridge does) results in the drive operating as slave.
Once I had properly cleared the solder bridge between 45 & 47, the original drive operated normally in the Toshiba Satellite once more.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-09-18, 15:02:

That's great news 😀 I do think the drives with the switch setting are the easiest option.

A note of caution too, if doing the solder CSEL > Master modification - I put the original Toshiba's Teac CD-220EA drive back into the caddy with pin 45 & 47 still connected on the caddy PCB, now the drive doesn't work somehow. So if doing the solder mod, avoid connecting an original working drive to that.

I was afraid that the mod would prevent recognizing original drives.

I will have to spare one caddy for that purpose.

Regarding the drives with switch - they seem to be quite uncommon. I have CRN-8245B.

GrzesiekOpowiada wrote on 2023-09-18, 08:49:

I have the BIOS updates from the official Dynabook support (I have downloaded them when they were available).

Yes, seems like Dynabook removed all downloads for the old Toshiba notebooks some months ago. That's really a shame 🙁
I couldn't even find an email address to contact them. I really hate when companies hide themselves in such a way

(Fortunately I downloaded most stuff for my two Satellites. But later I got another version that I now can't get the drivers for anymore)

HanSolo wrote on 2023-09-18, 16:36:

Yes, seems like Dynabook removed all downloads for the old Toshiba notebooks some months ago. That's really a shame 🙁
I couldn't even find an email address to contact them. I really hate when companies hide themselves in such a way

I have written to them using e-mail to Canadian support, but they have not responded. I have also written to them on messenger, they responded that they will check this problem. However, it has passed a couple of months and nothing is changing. Furthermore, they do not responding to my messages on messenger any more.

Some of the recovery CDs and drivers you could found on archive.org website in software. You have to try different searches e.g. https://archive.org/search?query=toshiba+cdt

If you have some drivers you could check which are compatible with your laptop using support.dynabook.com. On the left side of the screen showing details of the particular driver you have compatible laptops..

Maybe as a community we should write jointly to Dynabook and maybe they will recover the drivers..

The files are gone but the filenames are still there, hopefully they can correct it and don't just remove the older models altogether. You can use their website to find the filenames for your model, then use this archive.org link to get the files instead: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://209.167. … port/Download/*

BTW I have updated my post above, the original drive works normally now that I've cleared the solder bridge, so there's no real risk of permanent damage to a drive with this modification.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-09-18, 17:12:

The files are gone but the filenames are still there, hopefully they can correct it and don't just remove the older models altogether. You can use their website to find the filenames for your model, then use this archive.org link to get the files instead: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://209.167. … port/Download/*

You could also just copy and paste the link to the file directly from the support.dynabook.com and paste it to archive.org. It was working for a couple of files that I have checked.

Is there any list of laptop ATAPI devices with this master/slave switch?