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This is going to be short and VERY special interest but I wanted to put it out there since I’ve searched all over the internet and back and couldn’t find the answer myself. If you need to get into the bios on your Toshiba Libretto 50CT, reboot it and hold down the ESC key until it comes back with a prompt that says:
Check system. Then press [F1] key.
After that, the rest is pretty obvious. Hopefully this is useful to someone. BTW, I believe that 6.60 is the latest bios revision available. I have not tested this but supposedly if you click here you can get the latest bios for the Libretto 50CT. Apparently you need to put it on a 720K formatted disk according to other things I’ve read but it’s hearsay and I don’t really know for sure.
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thanks, you saved my day
Doesn’t work. I get the appropriate screen as you said when hitting key, but then it boots into dos anyway when I hit key.
Thanks for the suggestion, though. Next trick?
Mike
Just tried it on my Libretto. Turn it off, hold esc, turn it on and don’t release it until it tells you to press F1.
Thanks! I can confirm 6.60 is indeed the latest BIOS for this machine. Also, when holding down ESC, it’s important not to do so until it starts checking the RAM. Holding it down while the screen is black, or while the Toshiba Video BIOS 1.40 is loading did not work on my machine. I have to wait until the RAM test begins, then hold it until the F1 prompt appears.
About the 720K floppies for BIOS flashing, this is only necessary if you want to use the emergency recovery procedure. If you manage to brick the machine by turning it off when the BIOS is halfway written, for instance, you can hold down F12 while turning it on, with a 720K floppy with the BIOS on it inserted. You won’t see anything on the screen until it’s done recovering.
Normal BIOS flashing can be done with a standard bootable floppy made from the formatting menu of any windows machine, with the extracted files from 750tv66.exe on it (7-zip can extract them).
Tried the key also. It does tell you to hit key, but proceeds to boot into dos just the same as the above. I seem to recall a key combo that goes directly into the bios/setup routine, but can’t remember what it was. The above suggestion is not it, however. I wonder what this guy’s ct50 did when he tried the F1 key?
Working on libretto 100ct (so on 110ct also). Thank you
Hi,
Do you have the BIOS file to update a 50CT? The link you mention does not work anymore
I have one with a corrupted BIOS and need to fix it with the update procedure.
Thank you!
Hi Antonio, Unfortunately I don’t have that file. I already have the latest version on mine so I did not end up actually needing to do the update. I looked around on my computer to see if I had ever happened to grab the file but I didn’t. I also tried to look at the wayback and didn’t see it there either. I did a bit of research and found that the name of the file you are looking for is “B50CT.EXE”. These guys appear to have taken over Toshiba’s laptop business. You might reach out and contact them to see if they still happen to have this file in their archives https://emea.dynabook.com/support/drivers/.
Anyone here know how to reset the Libretto 50CT back to factory setting please. I prefer the easiest way possible. Many thanks…
When you say “reset to factory” I suppose that you mean reinstalling Windows 95? There really isn’t an easy way I’m aware of. You can get Windows 95 on floppy disk. So if you have the floppy disk drive peripheral, you can reinstall it from that.
The way I would personally do it is to pull the hard drive out of the laptop entirely and put it in a vintage (486/pentium era) computer and install it on there from CD. Make sure to copy all of the drivers that you will need to the hard drive so when you pop it back into the Libretto you are all ready to go.