Toughbook CF-25 Have to hit F1 to boot it, Why?

mancow · Post by **mancow** » Sun Oct 15, 2006 9:05 pm

I have a CF-25 that works great for a programming computer. It has Windows 95 on it and everything seems to boot and operate fine but you have to hit F1 before it will clear the RAM post.

It gets to a point then says "hit F1 to run setup". Once you do it boots fine.

I can't figure out how to get it to just boot normally.

Any ideas?

440roadrunner · Post by **440roadrunner** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 9:44 am

Errors like that are almost always caused by the "cmos" or bios battery being dead or low. I'm not familiar with toughbooks so I can't give you specifics

kb0nly · Post by **kb0nly** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 9:56 am

Sounds like the bios battery to me, i've had that problem on a few CF-25's and 27's. Not a terrible job, but not that easy either to replace them.

mancow · Post by **mancow** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 4:05 pm

I guess that's probably it but the thing that threw me off is how it never asks for a time update. With my old IBM with a known bad CMOS battery it would always ask me to input the date and time when I booted it. It would of course retain that until the next time the power was completely removed.

With this computer it just asks for F1 and then continues on to boot into WIN95.

I found a user manual and they mention that the F1 is a bios setup menu but I can never get it to actually access that. It just goes right past it and boots.

Here's another oddity. When I hit F8 after the starting WINDOWS95 appears it goes to the boot menu with the 6 or 7 options such as boot normally, boot into safe mode, boot in command prompt only, etc....When I hit 6 (command prompt only) to select a DOS boot it says C:\echo off then hangs forever. After a while it will go ahead and boot to WIN95.

I just want a damn DOS boot option without having to lose the convenience of having windows for file mangement and a CD rom to load files.

Post by **wavetar** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 4:16 pm

mancow wrote:
I just want a damn DOS boot option without having to lose the convenience of having windows for file mangement and a CD rom to load files.

Try this...go to a Windows98SE computer & browse to the "C:\Windows" folder. Find the "MS-DOS Mode with EMS & XMS Support" icon. Copy it over to the desktop of the Win95 computer. Double-clicking that will reboot the computer into a true DOS mode, where no aspect of Windows loads. Even if you do a hard re-boot, it will re-boot into DOS. You must type "exit" at the C prompt in order to have it re-boot back into Windows.

If you truly have a problem with your BIOS, then you may find that upon a hard reboot, it will go back into Windows without ever typing the "exit" command.

Todd

bellersley · Post by **bellersley** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 5:25 pm

Or, add the following line to MSDOS.SYS:

BootMenuDefault=6

That will cause your computer to boot to a command prompt instead of going into Windows.

Note: MSDOS.SYS is normally a hidden and read-only file in your root directory. Remove these attributes, then re-apply them when you're done.

Edit:

Or, if you prefer, create 2 partitions on your drive. Install pure DOS 6.22 on your "C" partition, then once it's installed, install Windows and tell it to install in the "D" partition. This way, when you boot your computer, you can have it load DOS or Windows. If you really want to get fancy, you can edit the startup file to load DOS by default instead of Windows.