Data recovery on Toshiba T3100 laptop

From: Dr. Ido <dr.ido_at_bigpond.net.au>
Date: Sat Jan 15 05:49:58 2005

At 07:53 AM 1/15/05 +0100, you wrote:
>Hello, cctech!
>
>I recently recieved a call from a friend of a friend regarding a laptop
>that has come into her posession after a coworker of her died. She was
>doing some sort of environmental research, and all her work is stored on
>this computer.
>
>I tried taking the path of turning it on and just doing a copy that way.
>No such luck - the plasma display has a garbled and not stable display -
>text is garbled to the point that I can't read it, and it basically
>looks like it's about to go straight to hell. It does boot from harddisk
>- I feared that the plasma might be sensitive to power variations or
>something like that, and thus tried getting the machine apart.
>
>After struggling to get the harddrive in sight (the braindead (%(/%
>&(/?/&%# engineers at Toshiba made the screen cable plug
>non-detatchable!!) it has a strange plug and from what I can tell has
>about 26 pins (I was counting on the ribbon, and I'm quite tired, so
>that may be wrong) and the disk seems to be of JVC manufacture.
>
>What does the plasma shakiness/garbledness mean?
>
>What type is the disk? Can I get it out and use it on another machine,
>or do i have to put the POS back together?
>
>Is the floppy drive 1.44M?

Did you try connecting an external monitor? I'm pretty sure they have a
CGA video output. Otherwise, from memory the same display panel was used
in the Compaq Portable III and a couple of other machines. Of course if
the problem in your 3100 is not the plasma panel, but the video on the
motherboard this will not help.

The hard disk sounds like a type I have seen in several other laptops of
that era (Zenith comes to mind). I bought one loose once not knowing what
it originally came from intending to put it in a Zenith, but could never
get it working properly.

>From some of the 1st T3100s had 720KB floppy drives, but all the ones I've
actually dealt with had 1.44MB.

>
>Has anyone heard of an Ashton-Tate program called FrameWorks? If and
>when I get the data off, I will need to convert this to a newer format -
>what is it? Text processing? Database?
>
>If I get the data off this machine, very cool things will come my way -
>at least an LSI-11, and maybe a lot more!! *giggle like schoolgirl* So
>any help is greatly appreciated!

>From memory it was one of those integrated packages that included a word
processor, spreadsheet and possibly more. If they are just word processor
documents something should be able to read it, even if it's just the file
viewer in XTGold (which can save text as ASCII).
Received on Sat Jan 15 2005 - 05:49:58 GMT