toshiba 430cdt

Forum: Laptops
Topic: toshiba 430cdt
started by: yib

Posted by yib on July 27 2005,00:36

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone could give me some advise. I have a toshiba 430cdt laptop, pentium 120Mhz with 16mb ram. The laptop can't boot off the cd, so I use the boot disk with the cd. The boot disk works fine, but when the cd tries to load DSL it encounters a seg fault and asks for the runlevel. Anyone know what the problem might be?

Thanks in advance.

Posted by cbagger01 on July 27 2005,02:53

Try booting with this command:

Code Sample

dsl 1 vga=normal atapicd noideraid nosound noapic noacpi acpi=off noscsi noapm nousb nopcmcia nofirewire noagp nomce mem=16M

at the boot prompt. Make sure that "mem" is lowercase and the "M" at the end of the 16M is uppercase. These commands should be typed all on the same line.

Posted by yib on July 27 2005,20:28

thanks for your help. That got the boot process going. What is just because the hardware was old?

Posted by yib on July 27 2005,21:11

I seem to have another problem now. when I try to start x, I get the following error:
xinit: no such file or directory (errno 2): no program named "//.xinitrc" in path.

I using xfbdev, us keyboard, ps2 mouse

Thanks again

Posted by cbagger01 on July 28 2005,01:12

There is some issue with 430's that require that the user tell the kernel how much RAM you have in order to boot up.

Other Toshiba users have used this command to get up and running.

The rest of the commands are just used to reduce memory usage because at first you only have 16MB of RAM and no swap space.

I dunno about the latest error. Maybe some of the other 430 users here can help.

Posted by clivesay on July 28 2005,03:22

I have a 430cdt with 40mb ram. I actually use xvesa 800x600 16bit. It works well. I'm running frugal on it. I even had xfree running but it took too much ram to be effective.

Chris

Posted by yib on July 28 2005,05:29

Thanks for all the help.

Things are up and running now. Specifying mem took care of things. x didn't run too well initially because of the lack of memory, but after I HD installed dsl, x is working fine.

The only thing that's not working right now the cdrom is not mounting for some reason. Mount.app keeps saying device is not ready.

Right now I've got 64mb swap, the screen is set at 800x600 16 bit.

Posted by yib on July 28 2005,08:09

Oops, just got it working.

Posted by dare2dreamer on July 29 2005,00:39

I'm typing this from a Toshiba Satellite 440 CDT, and it gave me no issues except getting the sound running (which was solved by adding a few parameters to a modprobe statement in bootlocal.sh).

These days, memory for these laptops can be found very inexpensively. I found a 64 meg stick for a whopping 25 dollars (US) on ebay. It made an enormous difference in the functionality of the laptop.

Most of the older toshibas had 16mb of ram on the system board, and a single expansion slot. I'd suggest finding some memory and making the most of it. It'll be the difference, in my experience, between something barely useable and a fully functional (albeit still a little slow) machine.

After all, my 25 bucks turned this hunk of free salvage into my "daily driver"

--dare2dreamer, who is hunting for some cf flash adapters on the cheap.

Posted by clivesay on July 29 2005,01:49

These old toshiba's are bricks but they are nice PC's. Mine still has a really bright screen. I'll have to take a peak on ebay and see if I can up the ram. Mine has 40mb in it now.

How many of these old 'brick' toshibas are floating around here? Tell us your story.

Posted by krypton2004 on Aug. 02 2005,20:55

I have a toshiba 720cdt that i had with dsl 0.9 and 1.0 but it a a problem with pcmcia, in that its network card kept loosing the connection, i;d have to ifdown ifup to get it too work again. I also wanted to have it running a remote desktop with sound running on the CLIENT machine but had no joy. Any one had these issues?

PS, for those of you who cant boot from CD, use "smart boot manager". you can put it on floppy, or hda and it'll then boot the cd or any other bootable device (except usb)., google it, you'll find it, and its very small and fast too.

Posted by yib on Aug. 06 2005,21:24

I just got everything working on the 430cdt. It is a old machine and I was surprised that I can run any gui effectively at all on it. I thought about getting more memory, but it didn't seem to be worth it. (keyboard is broken, cd tray doesn't stay put, battery is dead, don't know if pcmcia works...etc) right now it's just something I'm messing around with to see what will work on it.