Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

[dicky96]

Hi guys
I picked up a couple of interesting items last weekend at the car boot sale / flea market

One was already working apart from cleaning out the RAM and PCI slots (Asrock P4-66G Skt 478 mobo, 3GHz CPU, Geforce 2MX 400 and Sounblaster Live)

The other is this interesting laptop - I paid €25 euros for it - and it weighs a ton!

So it's a Toshiba T3100/20 which from a quick google is a 80286 CPU, 20Mb HDD, 640K Ram, and it's from around 1985

The guy said it was 'funcionando', which I took with a pinch of salt, but yes basically it does work

It looks like the CMOS battery has failed or discharged as it went into what I can only assume is the BIOS and thinks it is the year 1900. I detects a floppy drive and thinks there is a hard drive, but I don't know if the heads/cylinders are correct and would imagine they are set manually.

Anyway it says there is no boot device

Apart from that, it looks like some sort of connector is broken on one side (next to the floppy)

And the monochrome black & orange screen is not giving a good picture - there is one very bright horizontal line near the bottom and a couple of not so bright vertical lines, but other than that the black background has a lot of flickering feint orange lines

Soooo - does anyone know anything much about these laptops?
Is the screen something that could be fixed?
Is the flickering on the screen mage likely to be caused by bad caps?
Is it even worth fixing?

It looks like these are quite rare items, and it also appears there is some sort of collectors market for them, as some are for sale and some already sold on ebay. From what I see it is worth more just as spares or repair, than what I paid for it

[dicky96]

Re: Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

Hmm maybe I posted this in the wrong section - apparently it is not a laptop. It is a portable desktop device, as it is mains power only - so could a friendly moderator please move it to the desktop PC section please

[piernov]

Re: Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

Well it has an integrated keyboard and LCD so it's not that different from a laptop, and section says "Portable" devices too.

It's an interesting machine at least, sad for the LCD.
I doubt the lines are repairable, but if it's anything like some older PowerBooks and other laptops, there are aluminum electrolytic v-chip capacitors on the driver boards that do fail a lot and can be replaced with some recent MLCC. They can leak and damage traces/connectors.

For the HDD you probably have to set C/H/S manually indeed, should be written on the HDD sticker. Hopefully it's still alive.

[SMDFlea]

Re: Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

Interesting https://sudonull.com/post/9170-Alrea...SHIBA-T3100-20 ,according to that the CMOS battery is 3.6V .The screen is some sort of plasma so it might take some warming up to work properly.

[dicky96]

Re: Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

OK let's call it a laptop then

It's certainly an interesting device. I got it in pieces on the bench now. It really is clean inside. I did notice the CMOS battery is in fact dead, unless it is supposed to be a rechargable one and it's just flat.

There is a battery holder fixed on the motherboard but there are no wires going to it. Interesting.

The hard drive isn't IDE and it isn't ST506 either. I can't hear it spinning up -and apparently you should be able to hear these drives rather well, they don't sound exactly subtle!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-m1v1iMaOU

There is definitely power getting to the HDD, as I took the PCB cover off it, and I noticed that when the power is applied the head motor moves to the position shown in the attached pic. Quite why it moves to that position I don't know. If I power off and move it with my finger it usually goes back there, though if I move it to the end stop it doesn't move.

*** I experimented more with this. If I position the head a the end stop and power on it does not move. If I position it clockwise of the end stop it jumps to that 'favoured' position, and there is another position it likes before it. If I position the head a bit clockwise of that 'favoured' position, it moves a little further clockwise on power up. When the power is off I can move the head freely, when the power is on I can still move it but it clicks to the next position feeling like a rotary encoder. So the stepper motor is powering up but not being driven properly from what I can tell. Or only some of the coils in the stepper motor are being driven, possibly.

Maybe if I can get the HDD to actually spin, the head may do something more sensible?

So it seems I have a dead CMOS battery, a faulty HDD but it may be an electronic fault rather than mechanical, and a problem with the screen... but otherwise it is working (not checked floppy yet)

Oh and I have a service manual
https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...d946c37bba.pdf

Anyway - more pics......

[dicky96]

Re: Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

On the HDD - That inner nut thing in the centre of the larger nut of what I assume is holding the platter in place, the one with a little copper grounding springy thing - is it supposed to turn freely?

I can get a small screwdriver down there in the gap between the inner nut and outer nut, and I can rotate it, but it does not spin freely, it is quite stiff.

It does not move when I power the PC up.

You can see the back of the plasma display in the first image on the above post.

[SMDFlea]

Re: Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

I`ll bet that platter is as thick as a dinner plate . The schematic mentions a ni-cad battery as well conected to the floppy ? .It says it must be charged for an hour .

[dicky96]

Re: Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

I`ll bet that platter is as thick as a dinner plate .

But should it rotate freely by turning that nut?

[SMDFlea]

Re: Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

But should it rotate freely by turning that nut?

No idea , i found a pinout though that might help https://web.archive.org/web/20100711...ages/1091.html

[dicky96]

Re: Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

Thanks for the pinout SMDFlea - it gives me some chance to find out if the mobo is actually trying to power and access the HDD


Cheers

[dicky96]

Re: Toshiba T3100/20 Bought at the flea market - kinda working....

Hmmmm OK, so I have 12V and 5V power
Pin 11 -Motor On is low
Pin 20 -Drive Ready is High

So that looks like it should spin up... probably. But it doesn't spin so it isn't going ready.

Having said that Pin 7 -Drive Select/+Power Save is High - so it could be in Standby, if that is what 'power save' means. But then if Power Save means that, then why not just use motor on signal to implement it? So maybe Power save is something different.

Which kinda tells me there is a problem with the drive or the controller. Logically one would suspect the drive.

I could also try putting this back together and trying the drive parameters from this ducument. It's a shame I can't connect my monitor as it would be much easier to work on, this has a 9 pin (CGA??) D connector for external monitor.