~Toughbooktalk~

Hi all,
have a T-Book CF-28P 800MHz which is refusing to play ball...

I bought it already loaded with XP Pro and with no FDD or optical drive and it had been working fine (if somewhat slow) until I had the brainstorming idea of nuking the 30Gb HD and sticking in a 160Gb upgrade.
Boy oh boy, was that ever a bum move?

..... more than 9 months later, after more hours and various Forum posts than can be remembered, (on one thread alone, we are on Post 94!) I have arrived here seeking some help and advice.

The problem is that upon Boot, it just stalls - after the Panasonic logo or Bios, - on a blank screen, with a flashing cursor in the upper left hand corner of the screen.
I have now tried removing the Ram and Battery, various different hard drives, as well as multiple installs of each of Win2000 (the original system but not orig discs), Win98, XP Pro and Home, Lubuntu 12.04, Linux Mint 11 LXDE, Peppermint 3 and others. I have run Boot-repair various times with no errors being shown, and just don't understand why I can run forever from a Live CD, with all the graphics and modem working fine, yet we cannot seem to pass the first step upon Boot. ????
I can only imagine that this is a hardware problem. perhaps created by the DVD Rom/caddy that I purchased in January in the false hope that it would resolve the install problems?


So......

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Does it boot OK without the DVD? If so, the DVD probably is not set to Master as Panasonic requires. There is a simple mod to fix that in the CF-28 thread.

Hi,

no difference with or without the DVD Rom installed.

Cheers

And the manufacturer of the hard drive?

One brand of 160's had a bunch of bad drives. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... 3778,d.cGE

Good luck,

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

interesting to know..
The 160 is Samsung, although have also been having troubles with a Toshiba and Hitachi, although all of them work fine in my IBM T42.

Gonna downgrade to the Hitachi 40Gb and try again.

Thanks

Well, tried that, whilst installing Ubuntu 9.10 with a slight code variation...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1496711

and we have progress...

Not a lot, but it booted up to the words...

Grub loading.

That was 30 minutes ago.

Never did that before.

Did you use i915.modeset=1?

Have you read any of Glasen's stuff re:intel ? Some of the stuff I referenced in my NBR posts is no longer available. I just checked.

They are ignoring the existence of 9.10.

http://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws ... Fpanasonic

Replace TEST with your query for NBR.

I did a search for i915.modeset=1 and came up with this bum. http://forum.notebookreview.com/panason ... ost6422641

There is an earlier thread with Mint that may apply to 9.10.

Jeff

The 160 could be "bad" or perhaps the bios has a size limit on the HDD.

Did you check to see if that DVD drive was set to master as Springfield asked earlier? Just trying to narrow it down.

Shawn wrote:The 160 could be "bad" or perhaps the bios has a size limit on the HDD.

Changed down to a 40Gb...
How could I tell if there is a Bios restriction?

Cheers.