Toshiba Graphics Adapter Drivers Make PCs Obsolete

Today my brother gave me an early Christmas present when he saw that I was going to start working on some digital photos. He gave me a big wide screen monitor! Yay!

However, my Toshiba M200 will not support the new monitor’s 1920x1080 resolution. Sigh.

So I thought I’d document my research tonight.

The M200 display adapter is an NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 32M/64M (driver version 46.44, dated 2004-04-15), and 1920x1080 is not one of the supported resolutions. I looked for a newer driver, but the NVIDIA website says, “The manufacturer of this system requires that you download the driver for your GPU from their support site.”

Looking on the Toshiba website, I only found that other people were also looking for an updated driver with wide screen resolutions--and failing. Apparently Toshiba makes driver changes specific to their notebooks but doesn’t bother to keep updating the drivers to keep them from becoming obsolete.

This NVIDIA link (http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html) says that the 173.14.xx driver supports GeForce FX Go5200 32M/64M, but I can’t find any Windows or XP downloads for 173.14.xx. (The downloads appear to be for Unix/Linux.)

Gave up on Using HP 6980 Wirelessly

The printer no longer has an IP address, and I'm not willing to string an Ethernet cable across the house again, and Steve and I have wasted enough time on this printer again, so I'm giving up on using it wirelessly again.

Reconnect HP DeskJet 6980 Wireless

My HP Deskjet 6980 printer would no longer connect wirelessly after we changed routers recently. After much floundering, we finally got it working again. I hope--but am not sure--that I recorded all the pertinent steps for Windows XP here, in case I need to do this again in the future.

1. Connect a network cable to the printer.
2. Print a test page to make sure the printer has an IP address other than 0.0.0.0. (Press the second button from the right on the front of the printer.)
3. If the PC can't connect to the network, right-click the network icon in the system tray and choose View Available Wireless Networks, Change advanced settings, and Wireless Networks tab. Remove the network and add it back. Hopefully then the PC will successfully connect.
4. Select View Available Wireless Networks, Set up a wireless network for a home or small office, Add new computers or devices to the network, and Use a USB flash drive.
5. After the wizard says, "Your network settings are saved to the flash drive," I click on the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the system tray twice for the flash drive, since it's not successful the first time.
6. Then remove the flash drive from the PC and plug it into the front of the printer and wait for the printer to flash all its lights.
7. Remove the flash drive from the printer but do NOT plug it back into the PC and do NOT click Next in the wireless network setup wizard. (Otherwise, I had to delete the network and add it back to get network connectivity.)
8. In a browser window, go to the wired IP address for the printer (specified on the printed test page), run the wireless wizard, and print another test page to find the wireless IP address.
9. From Windows, open the properties for the printer and go to the Ports tab. Take a look at the port the wizard added (with the checked checkbox). Add a new port like that one but use the wireless IP address.

It sure seems like it should have been easier than this. Does anyone know a shorter procedure? The HP printer software has caused me so many nightmares that I only want to run it as a last resort. I'm glad I didn't have to reinstall HP software for this.

An HP web page helped, though.

Reimaging, Again

As I blogged before, the external CD/DVD drive that I originally bought with the tablet PC bit the dust and we replaced it with a different brand. The next time I needed to use a bootable CD, I found out that my PC can only boot with a select few CD/DVD drives, and my replacement was not one of them.

Tim and I were going to install BootIt™ Next Generation on my PC but ran into problems and decided to just reimage the PC again. Fortunately, our friend Bruce let us borrow his external CD drive that works as a bootable drive for my PC. However, after trying several different bootable disks and getting varying results—sometimes a successful boot but usually not—we are thinking that Bruce’s drive may be getting flakey. Also, Tim read online that both USB plugs have to be connected to a powered USB port for the Targus PADVW010, the drive Bruce loaned us, to work properly.

That was not the fatal problem, though. After spending quite a bit of time researching creating a bootable SD for my PC (again), I happened to look at the contents of the recovery disk that came with my PC. I was browsing around in files, and when I looked in RECOVERY.TXT, I saw this: “THIS UTILITY WILL NOT WORK IF YOU HAVE FORMATTED OR CONVERTED YOUR C: DRIVE AS NTFS!!!!”

My boot partition was NTFS. Sigh.

WARNING: The following notes may not be completely accurate because we tried so many different things.


Today, Tim ran the Western Digital (WD) tools from a CD to reformat my new WD 320 GB hard drive as FAT32 so that we could use the Toshiba M200 tablet PC recovery CD to put an image onto the drive. He specified just a 10 GB boot partition so that the format would go quickly. For this part of the procedure, Tim had installed the 320 GB drive into the second hard drive slot in his Dell PC because we couldn’t get the WD tools to work on my PC.

Then Tim put the WD drive back in my PC. However, the USB cables and my PC’s power cords interfered with each other, so we had to attach a powered USB hub to connect them all.

We booted up with the Toshiba recovery CD that came with the M200 and we saw the prompts to start the recovery. We had previously been able to get this far. After the initial warning screen and our acceptance of the installation, a pause (a couple minutes?) had us a bit worried. But then a Norton Ghost screen appeared. Yippee! We had reformatted with a 10 GB boot partition, but the recovery disk overwrote that with an image size of about 38154 MB, of which 2545 MB was used.

After the recovery disk finished its work, we booted the recovered hard drive in my PC and got past the initial Windows startup questions. Then Tim removed the hard drive and put it back in his Dell PC. He ran Image for DOS to create an image of this clean recover configuration. That image is on an external hard drive as a small, nice, clean backup that I can use even without Bruce's CD/DVD drive.

Once we had the 10 GB baseline partition, we then made a copy of it, and began updating Windows (e.g., got Service Pack 3). That took at least three reboots and update steps.

Normally we would want BootIt Next Generation to be the partition manager, but due to my PC's apparent BIOS limit of 137 GB, we can’t make partitions above that point, so over half the drive is unused.

We found that we could see the unallocated space with Image for Windows, but we couldn’t do anything with the space. Image for Windows sees all four primary partitions being used and no extended partitions. One possible solution might be to make one primary partition into an extended partition. Then Windows might allow us to get to the rest of the space.

We had hoped to get farther along today, but once again we’re giving up for this weekend. We still hope to find a way to create a partition for me to store my data separate from my programs.

NOTE: The WD tools will not boot from CD on my PC.

Converting .ISO to .IMG... Maybe

I don’t know if this really worked, but I want to save my notes since I had such a hard time figuring out how to use WinImage. I had already seen what looked like a complicated process for creating a bootable SD, so when I realized that my PC came with an “SD Memory Boot Utility,” I decided to try it.

However, it wanted a floppy disk .img file, and I had a .iso file for a CD. I read online that sometimes just changing the file extension would work, but the utility still didn’t recognize the file after I changed the .iso extension to .img.

Here’s the procedure I followed that failed but appeared to have promise.

1. From WinImage, open the ISO file and extract the contents to a local directory.
2. From WinImage, choose New, File. Since I wanted a size bigger than any listed, I chose a DMF option.
3. Choose Image, Inject a Folder, and select the folder containing the extracted files.
4. Chose File, Save As, and select .ima. Something I read online made me think that .ima and .img files are equivalent.

The above procedure didn’t work, though, since the root directory I wanted to create contained more than 16 entries. The WinImage help says, “DMF format has only 16 entries in the root directory…” I couldn’t find enough entries that I thought might not be needed, so I went on to another path… probably another dead end.

Automatic Backup, Finally

Tim started playing with FreeNAS and installed a terabyte FreeNAS server at my place. Maybe someday I’ll be able to get all my photos, including thousands that I haven’t been able to access for years, there! But we haven’t gotten that far yet.

Tim and I both started using CrashPlan as a free backup service, so I had my local PC data backed up when we decided to work on my PC again—in a way that might require reformatting.

Last night I copied about 50 GB from my PC to the FreeNAS server, and there was one delayed write failure. Uh oh—don’t know what caused that.

Hooray for Tim, SpinRite, and Image for DOS!

I am once again regretting that I have not been taking notes, thus requiring that I re-learn how to do things I’ve done before, now that I’m trying to re-image my PC again. It’s a Toshiba Portege M200 tablet PC.

Recently, I had a hard disk failure that made my PC unbootable. Horror of horrors! I started having withdrawal symptoms just thinking about my PC-less prospects. My magnificent hero, Tim, used SpinRite to recover my disk, the 80 GB drive that I’d had in the computer since I bought it in 2005. However, SpinRite reported some unrecoverable errors, and we weren’t quite sure of the full integrity of the hard drive.

Then we went to Fry’s Electronics and bought a WD Scorpio Blue 320 GB EIDE notebook hard drive, and Tim used Image for DOS to put the 80 GB hard drive image onto the 320 GB drive—in a partition that was a bit bigger than 80 GB (90 or 100?). I didn’t even know that putting an image onto something a different size was even possible. (Weeks later, we found out that using an NTFS partition for that would be a problem.)

Somewhere in this process, which took most of a weekend, the file system lost track of the rest of the 320 GB, so I have not been able to use the extra space on the notebook hard drive. Tim and I decided to address that problem on a different weekend. I used the PC for a couple weeks like that, but I planned to take Tim’s advice and install BootIt™ Next Generation to set up a clean partition that I could fall back on in the future.