Toshiba Satellite T1960CT drivers?

[SleepySheep]

Hey y'all. The title says it all, looking for drivers for this old T1960CT, but known-working generic replacements welcome. Specifics below.

Unfortunately, while this machine came with a hard drive with Windows 95 installed and all drivers present, the laptop no longer fully powers up when that old drive is plugged in. I can get it to boot with a CF-card-to-IDE adapter, but I'll have to install windows onto the new drive. And to do that, I think I need some kind of ASPI driver (+ CD Rom driver) on the boot floppy so that I can use my SCSI PCMCIA cd rom.

Anyone know where I can find em?

Thanks!

 

[GiGaBiTe]

Without knowing who made the PCMCIA SCSI card, or what model it is, we can't really point you in the right direction.

 

[Svenska]

I believe the T1960CT is a relative of the T4600C (which I happen to have), and looks similar enough spec-wise. I never had original software for the system, though. For many years, Toshiba Canada had an archive with drivers and software, but I believe that is gone now.

The hardware is quite standard. The QuickPort BallPoint uses a standard PS/2 interface, so is compatible with virtually any mouse driver; the video card is well-supported. The BIOS on the T4600C does not support hard drives other than the shipped ones, so I ran OnTrack Disk Manager.

There were special Toshiba DOS versions, but I've used the regular versions for years and they work well. Don't remember the specifics, but there was something which worked better with Toshiba DOS (suspend/resume maybe). Windows 3.x works well, but I stuck with the default video drivers. I found some random Card Service utilities for the PCMCIA chip and they worked fine.

Windows 95 works well if you have at least 8 MB RAM (i.e. a memory extension fitted), and supports all hardware out of the box - including the Docking Station using hardware profiles. It also has decent PCMCIA and SCSI support, so you may not need to worry about drivers for your card. DirectX 5.0 contains updated video drivers for the Western Digital chip.

I would recommend you to copy the Windows 95 installation files to the hard drive / CF card and install from there. Setting up Card Services + ASPI + CD-ROM drivers may or may not be easy, depends on your card.

 

[Thermalwrong]

Hey y'all. The title says it all, looking for drivers for this old T1960CT, but known-working generic replacements welcome. Specifics below.

Unfortunately, while this machine came with a hard drive with Windows 95 installed and all drivers present, the laptop no longer fully powers up when that old drive is plugged in. I can get it to boot with a CF-card-to-IDE adapter, but I'll have to install windows onto the new drive. And to do that, I think I need some kind of ASPI driver (+ CD Rom driver) on the boot floppy so that I can use my SCSI PCMCIA cd rom.

Anyone know where I can find em?

Thanks!

Do you have a working floppy drive? If not then 7zip can extract the .img floppy images and you can put those onto the CF card. It gets easier once PCMCIA is working though, then you can use a PCMCIA > CF adapter to ferry files across.

You can get the full set of drivers for the T1960CS or T1960CT right here, some kind person shared them: https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/9630/offer-toshiba-t1960cs-system-disks
Those include things like video drivers and the PCMCIA software. I archived a later version of the PCMCIA software which is better for larger ATA cards here: https://archive.org/details/tcm-30

The SCSI / ASPI driver part would be supplied by the vendor of your PCMCIA SCSI card, once the PCMCIA software is up and running to initialise the PCMCIA slots.

 

[SleepySheep]

Thanks for all your replies!

Without knowing who made the PCMCIA SCSI card, or what model it is, we can't really point you in the right direction.

The CD-Rom I want to install with is the Panasonic KLX-D740 PCMCIA CD drive, and the card it comes with is the Panasonic 4X XD-ROM Interface Card. When I *did* have a working hard drive running Windows on this laptop, I was able to get the device reading CDs using these drivers here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=57883&start=180. However, trying to follow a process on another thread (https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62201), it seems like I'll need a PCMCIA driver in addition to the CD Rom driver itself.You can get the full set of drivers for the T1960CS or T1960CT right here, some kind person shared them: https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/9630/offer-toshiba-t1960cs-system-disks

Those include things like video drivers and the PCMCIA software. I archived a later version of the PCMCIA software which is better for larger ATA cards here: https://archive.org/details/tcm-30

First off, thanks for the links to the drivers! You're the man!

Do you have a working floppy drive? If not then 7zip can extract the .img floppy images and you can put those onto the CF card. It gets easier once PCMCIA is working though, then you can use a PCMCIA > CF adapter to ferry files across.

I do have a CF -> PCMCIA adapter, and it works great for this laptop. Unfortunately, when the old hard drive died, my sole CF card became the new hard drive via a CF->IDE.

The SCSI / ASPI driver part would be supplied by the vendor of your PCMCIA SCSI card, once the PCMCIA software is up and running to initialize the PCMCIA slots.

So I need the CD Rom Driver, the SCSI/ASPI driver, and a PCMCIA driver, all loaded at, in order to read/install from a CD? Is that right?

I would recommend you to copy the Windows 95 installation files to the hard drive / CF card and install from there. Setting up Card Services + ASPI + CD-ROM drivers may or may not be easy, depends on your card.

I'm a total noob when it comes to the details of a 95 install. What steps are involved in this process? Load a boot disk. Partition the C drive. Copy everything over to the C drive. Use the freed up floppy drive to move needed drivers to the C drive. And then what? I have to edit Autoexec.bat and Config.sys right? But there's no editing tool with the boot disk I don't think. Please school this fool!

Thanks!

 

[GiGaBiTe]

So I need the CD Rom Driver, the SCSI/ASPI driver, and a PCMCIA driver, all loaded at, in order to read/install from a CD? Is that right?

Cardbus was basically ISA/PCI bus crammed into a tiny pin connector. If the cardbus controller had an option ROM that presented itself as a disk controller to the BIOS, you generally only needed the CD-ROM driver. If it was a SCSI controller, you may need the SCSI driver as well.

I'm a total noob when it comes to the details of a 95 install. What steps are involved in this process? Load a boot disk. Partition the C drive. Copy everything over to the C drive. Use the freed up floppy drive to move needed drivers to the C drive. And then what? I have to edit Autoexec.bat and Config.sys right? But there's no editing tool with the boot disk I don't think. Please school this fool!

It was common in Windows 9x installs to copy the install files to C:\Windows\Options\Win9x and then run setup.exe from that folder and install from the hard drive. By doing this, you always had all of the installation files available and Windows would never ask you to insert the CD when it needed to copy files from it during driver installs. By the mid to late 90s, hard drives were large enough that the dozens (95) or hundreds of megabytes of files (98/ME) weren't really an issue to have sitting there.

It's rather straightforward to do. Just boot from the install floppy and fdisk partition the drive. Reboot and boot back into the floppy and format the c:\ drive. Change to the c:\ drive and make the directory structure.

mkdir Windows
cd Windows
mkdir Options
cd Options
mkdir Win95
cd Win95
cd <drive letter of cdrom>
cd Win95
copy *.* C:\Windows\Options\Win95
cd c:\ (it should take you back to the Win95 directory)
setup.exe

I don't remember if DOS from Windows 95 supported pipe operations, if it did, the number of commands could be reduced a bunch. I use so many different CLIs that I don't make assumptions about what extra features are supported.

 

[Svenska]

So I need the CD Rom Driver, the SCSI/ASPI driver, and a PCMCIA driver, all loaded at, in order to read/install from a CD? Is that right?

First, you need the PCMCIA Card Services driver, which talks to the PCMCIA bridge chip. It detects and enables PCMCIA cards, making them visible to the system.

Then, you need the ASPI driver for your specific PCMCIA SCSI card. This driver talks to the PCMCIA card and makes its SCSI bus available to the system. (Some drivers contain a "PCMCIA Enabler", which allows them to be used without Card Services. I've seen this on network cards, but it's not common.)

Then, you need ASPICD.SYS, which is a generic driver for SCSI CD-ROM drives. It talks to the SCSI bus and makes any connected CD-ROM drives available to the system.

Finally, you need MSCDEX.EXE, which is a file system driver. It talks to the CD-ROM driver and makes the CD-ROM content available to the user. It is MSCDEX.EXE which provides the drive letter.

I'm a total noob when it comes to the details of a 95 install. What steps are involved in this process? Load a boot disk. Partition the C drive. Copy everything over to the C drive. Use the freed up floppy drive to move needed drivers to the C drive. And then what? I have to edit Autoexec.bat and Config.sys right? But there's no editing tool with the boot disk I don't think. Please school this fool!

You need to boot the computer and prepare a C drive. Mark it as "active" in FDISK. The Windows 95 CD contains a folder \WIN95. Copy all files from there to some folder on your C drive. Then run SETUP.EXE from this folder.

The installation process itself is very user-friendly, and Windows 95 will make itself the only operating system. It will handle autoexec.bat and config.sys for you, and will fix the boot process.

 

[SleepySheep]

Thanks for your help everyone! I was not able to get the CD Rom drive working while in the setup disk, but I was able to copy the Win95 folder onto the CF Card HDD using my WIn10 laptop and install from there. Once Windows was installed, it was fairly easy to get PCMCIA and my CD rom working again.

I'd still like to figure out how to get the CD Rom drivers installed while in the setup disk itself, to avoid having to remove the HDD from this old laptop again should I ever need to reinstall windows (the plastic is brittle and the tabbed edges are in danger of splitting next time I take it apart), but I guess I'll worry about that when the time comes.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

Maybe try finding a PCMCIA network card that has Windows 95 drivers available. Xircom used to be a popular brand back in the day, there are probably a few of them still floating around.

 

[Svenska]

I'd still like to figure out how to get the CD Rom drivers installed while in the setup disk itself

You need to create your own boot disk. The original setup disk is of no use for you.
Find some DOS drivers for your PCMCIA bridge ("Card Services") and SCSI card (ASPI driver) and build your own.

Alternatively, store the WIN95 installation files on a second partition (drive D), which allows you to format drive C without losing them. That's what I do, together with other relevant utilities (e.g. drivers, Norton Commander, PKUNZIP/WinZip, ...). Note that DirectX 5/6 contain updated graphics drivers to those shipped with Windows.

 

[CommodoreZ]

A T1960CT! Excellent choice.

People seem to have already supplied drivers, but the source I grabbed most of mine off of was the archives from either Toshiba or Dynabook. I can't seem to find them now, or the URLs to hunt for the wayback machine versions.

However, I do have a few links that are relevant to the 486 series T19XX series machines (and a few others) which helped me work on mine. I recommend reading the issue caused by the large capacitors failing in the PSU on the lower PCB inside. Forgive me for being lazy and copy/pasting these off of my website.
Vobarian Software - Fix for Power-on Problem in Toshiba 486 Laptops
Unofficial 486 Toshiba FAQ (via wayback machine)
Vogons - Fixing T19XX series laptops
The Basement - T1910 repair video
VCForums - Toshiba flash codes
Minus Zero Degrees - Toshiba Service Manuals

 

[Thermalwrong]

Specifically the cap that fails on the Toshiba T1900, T1910, T1950, T1960 series and the T4500 / T4600 / T4700 is the 6.3v 1000uF capacitor, which is C511 on the T19xx series. It's not the large capacitors that go initially but of course that doesn't mean they can't fail. But the 1000uF seems to quite reliably leak and go high ESR.

They're always Elna and I think even Toshiba knew these had a bad failure rate because the later T4850CT I have has uprated that to a 6.3v 2200uF where the same power board on the T4700CT has the 6.3v 1000uF cap there, no other changes in the power board. They also switched over to the Elna LongLife type of capacitor - from what I've seen so far those don't fail anywhere nearly as badly as the regular Elna caps from 1993, even on laptops that have roasted for years, where every other cap had failed.
Not that that's too helpful for the T19xx series since they have a height limitation there.

 

[SleepySheep]

Specifically the cap that fails on the Toshiba T1900, T1910, T1950, T1960 series and the T4500 / T4600 / T4700 is the 6.3v 1000uF capacitor, which is C511 on the T19xx series. It's not the large capacitors that go initially but of course that doesn't mean they can't fail. But the 1000uF seems to quite reliably leak and go high ESR.

They're always Elna and I think even Toshiba knew these had a bad failure rate because the later T4850CT I have has uprated that to a 6.3v 2200uF where the same power board on the T4700CT has the 6.3v 1000uF cap there, no other changes in the power board. They also switched over to the Elna LongLife type of capacitor - from what I've seen so far those don't fail anywhere nearly as badly as the regular Elna caps from 1993, even on laptops that have roasted for years, where every other cap had failed.
Not that that's too helpful for the T19xx series since they have a height limitation there.

Thanks for the info! I actually have a T1950CT that has a power issue. I used a couple parts from that machine to fix my T1960CT but I think there's still enough for a functional laptop if I can get that capacitor fixed.

A T1960CT! Excellent choice.
View attachment 1288288
People seem to have already supplied drivers, but the source I grabbed most of mine off of was the archives from either Toshiba or Dynabook. I can't seem to find them now, or the URLs to hunt for the wayback machine versions.

However, I do have a few links that are relevant to the 486 series T19XX series machines (and a few others) which helped me work on mine. I recommend reading the issue caused by the large capacitors failing in the PSU on the lower PCB inside. Forgive me for being lazy and copy/pasting these off of my website.
Vobarian Software - Fix for Power-on Problem in Toshiba 486 Laptops
Unofficial 486 Toshiba FAQ (via wayback machine)
Vogons - Fixing T19XX series laptops
The Basement - T1910 repair video
VCForums - Toshiba flash codes
Minus Zero Degrees - Toshiba Service Manuals

Thanks! It turns out the default windows drivers have been enough to get all the devices on this machine working. And it works great! Thankfully, the capacitors in the T1960CT all seem to work.

 

[Thermalwrong]

BTW if you're playing games on the T1950CT / T1960CT, I've just found out they have a utility to stretch 320x200 to 320x240/640x480 without black bars. There doesn't seem to be a performance hit, the scaling isn't too noticeable and is nicer than having black bars at the top & bottom.
You can find that on the Toshiba Companion Disk RCA72 (1RCA72.IMG) from here: https://archive.org/details/ToshibaSatelliteT2450CT
Once installed you just run it manually or in autoexec and it'll stretch the graphics. Only works on the T1950CT / T1960CT though (not T1960CS etc) as they have the WD90C24 graphics chip which is all that stretch.exe is designed for. It works for the T4700 / 4800 / 2400 series too, which is why there's a T4850CT in my picture.

It's supposed to be on the companion disk for the T1950CT but I can't see it there on the disks for the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/t1950ctdiskimages
Hmm, you may need the SVGA driver from there if you're running Windows 3.11, the VGA chip in the T1950CT / T1960CT is different from the T1960CS images that I initially pointed you to.

 

[3lectr1c]

I'd recommend replacing all the ELNA capacitors at this point. Older Toshiba machines like the T1200XE are getting so reliably roached by them that finding any one of them that's even recoverable after a recap is becoming difficult. Best to take care of these while they're not yet that bad.

 

[SleepySheep]

BTW if you're playing games on the T1950CT / T1960CT, I've just found out they have a utility to stretch 320x200 to 320x240/640x480 without black bars. There doesn't seem to be a performance hit, the scaling isn't too noticeable and is nicer than having black bars at the top & bottom.
You can find that on the Toshiba Companion Disk RCA72 (1RCA72.IMG) from here: https://archive.org/details/ToshibaSatelliteT2450CT
Once installed you just run it manually or in autoexec and it'll stretch the graphics. Only works on the T1950CT / T1960CT though (not T1960CS etc) as they have the WD90C24 graphics chip which is all that stretch.exe is designed for. It works for the T4700 / 4800 / 2400 series too, which is why there's a T4850CT in my picture.

It's supposed to be on the companion disk for the T1950CT but I can't see it there on the disks for the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/t1950ctdiskimages
Hmm, you may need the SVGA driver from there if you're running Windows 3.11, the VGA chip in the T1950CT / T1960CT is different from the T1960CS images that I initially pointed you to.

Thanks for the tips!

How's doom running on that machine for you? I find that Wolfenstein 3d runs perfectly on the T1960CT but Doom is extremely sluggish. Runs at speeds somewhere between unpleasant-but-playable to completely-unplayable, depending on what is being rendered in the moment. Is there some source port out there that runs with great efficiency than the original shareware port?

A T1960CT! Excellent choice.
View attachment 1288288
People seem to have already supplied drivers, but the source I grabbed most of mine off of was the archives from either Toshiba or Dynabook. I can't seem to find them now, or the URLs to hunt for the wayback machine versions.

However, I do have a few links that are relevant to the 486 series T19XX series machines (and a few others) which helped me work on mine. I recommend reading the issue caused by the large capacitors failing in the PSU on the lower PCB inside. Forgive me for being lazy and copy/pasting these off of my website.
Vobarian Software - Fix for Power-on Problem in Toshiba 486 Laptops
Unofficial 486 Toshiba FAQ (via wayback machine)
Vogons - Fixing T19XX series laptops
The Basement - T1910 repair video
VCForums - Toshiba flash codes
Minus Zero Degrees - Toshiba Service Manuals

Just wanted to mention I really love that background on this laptop. It's a perfectly stylish fit.

 

[CommodoreZ]

Is there some source port out there that runs with great efficiency than the original shareware port?

I've had a very playable, decent framerate with DOOM95 in 320x240 mode. I haven't played much of it, but it seemed to be a pretty solid experience.

Just wanted to mention I really love that background on this laptop. It's a perfectly stylish fit.

Thanks! It was a scaled version of artwork I found somewhere on the web, can't recall where. These days I'm using a modified version of artwork by Simkaye.



It also comes in a night mode version, seen here on the T1960CT in a comparison photo with an as-yet unrepaired T4900CT. I need to crack it open and fix the floppy drive one of these days among other things...



May I ask what sort of hard drive you're using with your T1960CT? An authentic Toshiba option, some other variety of small IDE drive, or a modern replacement? I've got a 1GB CF card in mine, though I've only got 500MB available due to limitations of the BIOS/hardware. I'm told there are ways to shoehorn around this and get a bit more storage, but at present I'm not all that interested in exploring that since I've got a good stable installation going. The plastic is too fragile for me to want to open and close repeatedly for the sake of finding out if I can indeed cram more storage inside.

 

[SleepySheep]

I've had a very playable, decent framerate with DOOM95 in 320x240 mode. I haven't played much of it, but it seemed to be a pretty solid experience.


Thanks! It was a scaled version of artwork I found somewhere on the web, can't recall where. These days I'm using a modified version of artwork by Simkaye.

View attachment 1289126

It also comes in a night mode version, seen here on the T1960CT in a comparison photo with an as-yet unrepaired T4900CT. I need to crack it open and fix the floppy drive one of these days among other things...

View attachment 1289127

May I ask what sort of hard drive you're using with your T1960CT? An authentic Toshiba option, some other variety of small IDE drive, or a modern replacement? I've got a 1GB CF card in mine, though I've only got 500MB available due to limitations of the BIOS/hardware. I'm told there are ways to shoehorn around this and get a bit more storage, but at present I'm not all that interested in exploring that since I've got a good stable installation going. The plastic is too fragile for me to want to open and close repeatedly for the sake of finding out if I can indeed cram more storage inside.

That's also an A+ background. You've got good taste

I am using a CF Card-to-IDE adapter for the HDD. It's got two 512 mb cards in it. Like you, I purchased larger CF cards only to find out the bios can't recognize anything larger than 512.

There was a working HDD in the machine with Windows 95 but after a couple months of tinkering, the computer won't fully power on with that Hard drive in any more. Thankfully I managed to copy some interesting old artifacts off that drive beforehand. I had a second physical HDD with windows 3.1 that I pulled from a nonworking 1950CT, and that HD still runs in the 1960CT, so I think the original drive from the 1960 is just toast.

I also don't want to open up this machine again because of the brittle plastic, but it looks like I may have to any way, due to having a floppy drive belt that slips off the spindle v.v

 

[Svenska]

On my T4600C, the BIOS would only detect a 120 MB drive (which was the original size).
I've used the OnTrack Disk Manager with great success to get around that and used an 800 MB drive for many years.

In today's world, I would recommend a CF card with adapter.