BIOS Updates forum

Is this a BIOS problem? I took apart my Toshiba Protege 7020ct laptop to fix a broken pressure sensitive switch that is under the left and right click button. I only got as far as getting the housing open and looked inside to see how hard it would be (I did not remove any parts). The hard drive, battery,ac power supply were all removed before I started. After I decided it was to hard to do at this time I reassembled the laptop. When I restarted windows xp I got a error saying that I had a bad or missing driver System32\drivers\isapnp.sys & pci.sys. I removed the hard drive and installed the original hard drive that has windows 98. Whan i started 98 I recieved a error about some driver or file missing or corupt. this laptop has been running perfect for two years untill I messed it up. Did the bios get messed up, but how. I work with computer parts at work and am very carefull about grounding myself. I have no experience with booting up from a floppy. Since this model of laptop has no installed cd rom, all externial through the pcmia slot. It all has to be done with out cd support. I do have a cable that will allow me to connect the 2.5" HD to my desktop. When i tried this with the xp HD I ran the repair program off of the xp cd and nothing changed when I tried it again in the laptop. To sum up. Before I took it apart it worked fine. After it will not boot up and i have no cd support unless I connect the HD to the desktop.
Note: When I had the xp HD connect to the desktop it would not boot up here either. Just a blinking rectangle at the top left of the black screen. I did copy the drivers that it asked for when it was connected to the desktop with no change later when tried in the laptop.

Thank you

If it were me, I might consider resetting the BIOS in case it got scrambled somehow as you suggested.

However, it otherwise sounds like some unfortunate damage might have been done, even with the care you have taken. I'm sure laptops are more sensite in their hardware than desktop computers and I would not like to do any hardware work on laptops myself unless it didn't matter if I ruined things.

If the BIOS battery became unplugged and I did not know it, what would the systems be?

Where can I find a step by step on flashing the BIOS?

Thank you

Usually if you download a BIOS upgrade the manufacturer does, or at least they probably should, provide some documentation and instructions.

However, since your laptop was OK originally, I don't expect that flashing the BIOS will resolve your problems.