I have a question.
I acquired a Toshiba 1200 laptop. It had MS-DOS 3.30 as its oper. sys. Someone formatted the hard drive and was using a disk with DOS 5.0 to boot it. I have tried to re-install the original DOS 3.30, but it says it can't read the media. It is in perfect working condition, it just doesn't have an operating system. What are some options? Thanks!

Why do you want to revert to Dos 3? Dos 5 will be okay......

Do you kwnow what the capacity of your hard disk is? It sounds to me like “someone” ran FDISK, broke the dos 3.3 partition and repartitioned the disk with dos 5, then formatted it. Dos 3.3 will give the error message you discribed when it cannot understand a partition larger than 32mb.

If you want to use DOS 3.3:
1. boot a DOS 5 disk with the FDISK utility on it
2. run FDISK
3. delete all the partitions
4. boot your dos 3.3 disk
5. run dos 3.3 FDISK
6. create a primary dos partition and set it active
7. reboot dos 3.3
8. format /s c:\

hope this helps
-the computer expert

Do you know the capacity of your hard disk? It sounds to me like “someone” ran FDISK, broke the dos 3.3 partition and repartitioned the disk with dos 5, then formatted it. Dos 3.3 will give the error message you described when it cannot understand a partition larger than 32mb.

If you want to use DOS 3.3:
1. boot a DOS 5 disk with the FDISK utility on it
2. run FDISK
3. delete all the partitions
4. boot your dos 3.3 disk
5. run dos 3.3 FDISK
6. create a primary dos partition and set it active
7. reboot dos 3.3
8. format /s c:

hope this helps
-the computer expert

Um, you messed up on #8. It should be:

format c: /s

not format /s c:

opps! you are right, I messed up line 8. thanks for the correction.

-the computer expert

Is the disk you are trying to use a 720k or 1.44? The Toshiba 1200 has a 720 disk drive in it. to use a 1.44 disk cover the left hole (looking at the disk from the front) It should accept the dos 5 program with out any problem. I have two of these pc's and they are both running Dos 6.2. Take care.