I bought a Toshiba Tecra 520CDT that has a couple of minor problems (it only cost me £10) and I want to reinstall Windows 98 in the hope that it will fix whatever is causing the display to only work in 16 color mode.

First problem: I can't figure out for the life of me how to get into the BIOS! :confused:
I tried Del,Esc,F1,F2,F8,F10,F11 and Ctrl Alt Del... no luck so far.

Second problem: I've heard that if you delete the copy of Windows that comes with the laptop and you don't have the original installation disk that the laptop is supplied with, it will be as dead as a door-stop because you can't install a normal copy of Windows... So maybe it was just as well I couldn't get into BIOS - I'd probably have screwed it up already. :D

Is there somewhere I can get the original disk?

Ok... this didn't sound like a windows problem to start with. More like a display adapter problem! You could have solved this by installing the correct video drivers from the toshiba web site.

Try F12 to enter the bios if I'm not mistaken... been a while since I worked on a toshy :/

Now that you've diddled it I'm not sure what to suggest. You can take a look on eBay for a copy of windows 98 or my suggestion would be a copy of window 2000, which will be more stable and I know that you can still get supporting video drivers from the toshiba web site for the windows 2000 operating system.

Thanks Imp :)
It doesn't seem to want to let me into BIOS (I think I've run out of keys to press!) but I'm sure I'll get there eventually - it's a fun project anyway.

I've got a Windows 98 disk, and I found the drivers but the display still won't change.. maybe it's something in the BIOS? I'll try installing the display adapter driver again tomorrow.

I can probably find a copy of Windows 2000 but I'm not sure if this old laptop will handle it - it was designed for Windows 95 so it's pretty ancient; I'll check the system requirements anyway.

Sorry that didn't work out. Try downloading the user manual for the laptop from the link I've provided below, that, at least should tell you how to access the bios.

Toshiba - Download your manual here

If the problem is the display you have to find out what video adapter is in the laptop and set the Display settings to that adaptor. Its probably set to default SVGA.

Thanks Scott and Imp.
It took me a little while but it turned out to be a simple fix after all - to get into BIOS I held down the Escape key the second the laptop started up. I selected "stretch screen" to get full screen. Then I found the display driver - I had to load it from a floppy drive but it worked.
So now I have a perfectly good laptop. :)
It's very old - 133mhz MMX processor- but it's good enough for what I want.