Date: Fri, 03 May 2002 16:43:10 +0100 From: Iain Cairns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: L100 / Partitioning / Overlay / Win98 Install / Overclock / 12.5mm HD (!!!)
Hi everyone SORRY this is all in one LONG post but I thought I'd never get round to writing this stuff otherwise! If anyone replies, please quote paragraphs SELECTIVELY or the daily digest is gonna read like War & Peace(!). By the way, thanks to all posters to this list and to Dan/Mike for hosting it. I've found it a fantastic source of info for setting up my second-hand L100. Also particular thanks to David Chien's Adorable Libretto site, amherst.co.uk's Lib site and Dr Xin's fixup.net (Dr Xin cracks me up - "Why Sony skimp on components? Bad Sony!"... I'm going to buy a dog and call it Sony, just so I can shout "Bad Sony!"). Just for everyone's info, I thought I'd share my experiences of settting up a blank (no OS installed) Libby over recent months. Until now, I've been a Mac person but the Lib has forced me to get intimate with Windows and PC stuff! Firstly, I have been successfully using an IBM Travelstar 48gig 12.5mm-high drive (model 48GH) in my L100. Has anyone got a bigger one? (Nudge nudge, wink wink...) Bought the L100 second hand on ebay UK with a standard 2gig HD but wanted to upgrade to the biggest capacity laptop drive I could find at the time, because I wanted to use my Libby as a mobile MP3 jukebox (among other things), and didn't want to run out of HD space any time soon. Of course, foolishly I hadn't properly researched into the subject and didn't fully realise that (A) the IBM HD was 12.5mm high, and (B) you can't put a 12.5mm high HD in a Libby. However, luckily for me, it turns out YOU CAN! You just need to take out a mysterious credit card-sized slab of metal under the plastic film over the HD space. This is probably a vitally important slab (for heat dissipation or blocking radio inteference maybe?), but the Libby has worked okay without it, so I'm assuming it's the Toshiba equivalent of a human appendix. Even without the slab it's a tight squeeze, but the case will just about screw shut again with the HD in place. This means that L100/110 owners can in theory also use the newer IBM 60GB Travelstar HD which is also 12.5mm high. Of course, since Christmas, bigger 9.5mm HDs have arrived which make it easier to 'go large'. *NOTE*: Anyone doing this should be aware of possible damage to your onboard memory chips, you must keep the cushioning pads in place which stop the HD scraping/pressing on the motherboard - see fixup.net for details. Re the ongoing partitioning debate, I set up the new 48gig HD, based on info I gleaned from this list (details may be fuzzy as it was a few months ago): - Updated the L100's BIOS to latest version (v8.10). - Installed IBM Ontrack Disk Manager overlay program - v9.5.5? Suppose I could have used EZbios but went with IBM to match the HD. - Formatted C partition in FAT32 using a Win98 startup floppy to maximum 8meg-ish size offered. (Partition Magic now tells me this C partition goes from physical sector 63 to 16,354,169 for a total of 7985.4 MB.) - Installed Win98SE with great difficulty - I only have a USB external CD (won't work in DOS?) and didn't have easy access to a desktop PC for popping the laptop HD in with an adapter (I work in a Mac-based office). Eventually did it by installing DOS IP drivers and FTP program (I have a Xircom PC card combo LAN/modem), and logging onto a Mac FTP server to copy the Win98 CD files over onto the Lib's HD, then installing from the HD. - Then had to partition the remainder of the HD to avoid hibernation overwrite disasters. (I only needed another big FAT32 space, no Linux/NTFS stuff.) Using Partition Magic, created an extended primary partition in the remaining space (37,793.5 MB). Then created a logical D partition within this of approx size 37,692 MB, which left an unallocated space of approx 101 MB at the end of the extended partition. - Then used PM to drag the D partition to the END of the extended partition, meaning the unallocated 101 MB - my hibernation area - was now at the BEGINNING (sectors 16,354,233 to 16,563,014), ie just after the 7985.4 MB C partition recognised by the BIOS. (101MB hibernation space may be excessive as I only have 64 MB RAM, but best not to take chances, eh?) The 37gig D partition is now sector 16,563,078 and upwards. - In Windows power settings, hibernation is turned OFF - I understand this is different to *BIOS hibernation*. (This BIOS hibernation now kicks in when the battery gets to a certain low level, and you get the nice graphic of the Libby doing a brain dump to the HD.) - Installed a few Lib drivers from the web, e.g. the widescreen video driver, and I think maybe a one to control the Lib mouse-thingy. However, I have refrained from putting too many of these extra Toshiba drivers on to my Lib, unless something obviously is not working - if it ain't broke then don't fix it. :) I have not for instance put on any special Tosh power drivers - is this the fabled fuzzy light bulb? Does anyone have a clear description of what all these drivers actually do and which ones are useful/necessary? Anyway, seems to work okay so far (a few months) with no corruption of vital data by hibernation. Sorry again for the LONG post, but I hope this info may help Lib upgraders/new Libby owners in the same boat as me. Cheers Iain PS - Last weekend overclocked successfully to 266 using Xin's excellent instructions - I'm a soldering virgin but his soldering advice is pure Jedi wisdom. With shaky hands (as I was sure I was gonna fry my Libby) I put a blob of solder on the iron and just kind of dragged/smeared it in one quick motion across the two relevant pads, and got out of there while my luck held. Verified it really is now 266 with a little clock speed utility. To be honest, though, I haven't noticed much change in performance since then - except maybe it runs hotter! Oh well... -- ************************************************************** http://libretto.basiclink.com - Libretto mailing list http://www.silverace.com/libretto/ - Archives -------TO UNSUBSCRIBE------- Reply to any of the list messages. The reply mail should be addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Then replace any text on the message's subject line: cmd:unsubscribe --------TO UNSUBSCRIBE DIGEST------ Do above but with this on subject line: cmd:unsubscribe digest **************************************************************