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I bought a used laptop a toughbook cf41, it came preloaded with win95 and office pro, I couldn't remove office so I formatted C; and was going to but an old version of open office on it until I ran into a problem
When I formatted the drive the floppy drive became unrecognized, I tried a parallel port floppy drive and it also would not recognize it.
I then tried a different Hard drive with win95 (b) on it, and the laptop would boot up, but it would not recognize the floppy either the A drive or a parallel port floppy.
Searching around for I've found that the old panasonic supports most HD on boot, but how do I get the floppy drive recognized?
I have tried using the panasonic utilities floppy to go into bios, but the A drive isn't being recognized.And the floppy is removable, I've tried booting without the floppy drive installed, but withe parallel port floppy connected and I had no luck with that either.
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You don't normally need a floppy to get into BIOS. Quite commonly you hit the Del key or one of the F keys whilst booting. Watch the screen during boot it might tell you how if you look fast. It often calls it Setup.
DerekW
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Tried every key Derek, no luck, I even tried key combinations like FN+DEl or FN+F7 etc.Nothing, I am thinking about formatting a drive in DOS 6.22 adding winlink and then copying over win95 from a different laptop in the hope that the floppy or parallel port will be recognized in a new system.
I do occasionally get a "backup memory battery failure press f1 to continue which of course leads to a "No operating system" message...
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"Tried every key Derek, no luck, I even tried key combinations like FN+DEl or FN+F7 etc". You need to continously tap whatever key works from the time you start until the BIOS screens open. Watch the screens that appear when you first start the computer. The correct keystrokes to enter the BIOS should be displayed there.
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Thanks for the suggestion onthehill, the only message that comes up is "Matsushita...1994 chips and...technologies...." there was no "press fx key to enter bios" message.I did some digging on this model and the one webpage that mentions the bios states that a dos floppy is required to access the bios, so I maybe out of luck on this project.
Thanks to all.
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How do I access the BIOS at startup?
You can't - it's only accessible via a DOS application. Don't worry about it, though - it's not much use. There appears to be no limitation on hard disk size, and a new hard disk will work without reconfiguration of the BIOS.
(found in 10 seconds)
As advised there, try a drive adapter, and make the HDD bootable (etc) from another machine - although you might consider the assessment made:
It was designed for Win3.1, and while you can get Win95 running on it, that's hardly an advantage.
Why is format the first thing folks want to do?
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real.
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I had found that article weeks ago, before I ever formatted the laptop, it mentioned nothing about losing the floppy drive during a format, as i'm sure you are aware...I had planned on formatting and running wfw 3.11 as the panasonic HD was very small.
I will fish around for a drive adapter however, it may be the only way to keep it from the scrap heap.
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