hello, i bought a toshiba t3200sx recently. when i run it then it wants me to run setup. on the screen before setup it says that the clock chip lost poswer, which i am guessing would be because it wasnt connected for a while, and on the line below that it says CMOX checksum invalid. i run setup, then reboot, and it has some kind of error which i cannot see, since the words are only there for half a second. then on the next screen it says: "bad command or file name" does it need a startup disk? or does it need to be formatted? please help!

It might help fond the error/s if you post the autoexec.bat & config.sys. M2 If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

Have you entered the HDD parameters yet? From your "bad command or file name" error, it appears it doesn't know what size drive it has. Since the clock lost power, the rest of the BIOS info is likely waiting to be corrected as well...

"bad command or file name" in this case seems likely to be generated from c:\autoexec.bat - if it's able to read that, odds are the drive is being 'seen' correctly, although on anything that old, battery probably is toast Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons. - Popular Mechanics, 1949

Doh... Yep, jboy's right again. You can tell I'm getting rusty... Haven't setup a machine's BIOS in over 6 months now...

For sure things are simpler these days - nearly everything is automagically done ; ) I think on some of those (older) machines the drive settings might persist even if the CMOS is weak or failing Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons. - Popular Mechanics, 1949