Toshiba fills screen with "M" characters...

[Mini-Me]

Hi all!
:-)

I have here, a Toshiba Satelitte Pro 400CDT laptop, that when switched on, tries tp fill the screen with "M" characters.

If you plug in an external keyboard, the problem remains.

If you physically remove the laptop keyboard, and remove it's flat-cable connection from the guts of the laptop, the problem remains(in that with no external keyboard or even the Toshiba laptop keyboard itself removed, upon power-up, the screen tries to fill with "M" characters.

This problem has only recently cropped up.
You can hit "ENTER" to stop the "M"'s, but M and several other keys on the keyboard will not work...

Any ideas?

BIOS version = 5.70, recently updated from 5.30 - install program reported that the update was completed sucessfully.


K.

[Mini-Me]

ADDITIONAL: Some keys pressed on the keyboard(laptop one) produce some strange strings of characters, such as "O" which produces: "1)rt@41$1" all as one string when "O" is pressed...

Laptop only brought last week, and worked beautifully for the last few days - please don't tell me that this laptop is now heading rapidly towards being a paperweight...
:(


MM.

[Rick]

Only a week Old..
Return it for warranty work

[Budfred]

If it has a warranty, I would stop messing with it and return it for work... If it doesn't, I would run security scans...

If you boot into Safe Mode or DOS, will it still do the "M"s or is it only in Windoze??? If it is only in Windoze, I would suspect a virus or some other infection.

[Mini-Me]

The machine does the "M"'s in DOS - only boot to DOS, no Windows on this machine(either 3.11 or 95/98)

The HDD was given a clean bill of health only a few days ago.

When you boot up:

- BIOS announcement
- RAM check
- "Starting Windows 95..."
- "C:\>mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmm"

Machine not under warranty, as this is an old Pentium 75...
Cannot return for service, as this machine is 2nd hand...


G.

[Rick]

A good place to start looking would be the mouse or one of the ports ( Com1/2 or PS/2 )
Unplug anything connected . Possible stray signal being generated

Second I’d check the config.sys and autoexec.bat files
Look for any commands calling or listing a command of any kind other than the normal device drivers.. You should be able to remark each out using edit

You say it doesn’t have windows on the system.
But it shows Starting win95
So another place to look is the msdos.sys file

It should Look something like this
[Paths]
WinDir=C:\WINDOWS
WinBootDir=C:\WINDOWS
HostWinBootDrv=C

[Options]
BootMulti=1
BootGUI=1
DoubleBuffer=1
AutoScan=1
WinVer=4.10.2222
;
;The following lines are required for compatibility with other programs.
;Do not remove them (MSDOS.SYS needs to be >1024 bytes).
;xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxa

Change the BootGUI=1
to BootGUI=0


If you have a dos 6.22 boot floppy try that and see if the MMM continues

[Mini-Me]

O.K.
I've tried those things you suggested, and here are the results:

Nothing pluged into any of the ports.

There is no CONFIG.SYS, as no system drivers are required for this PC in it's current task.
AUTOEXEC.BAT has one line in it, which sets up the ESS sound subsystem for the required volume levels, and that's the only command in there.

System boots to DOS 7 from a Windows 95B boot disk, as all I want is a FAT32 DOS filesystem for an MP3 player.

I have done this before on more then 6 seperate computers, and all of them worked fine.

MSDOS.SYS has been edited in the following way:

[OPTIONS]
Logo=0
BootGUI=0

These lines stop the Windows 95 logo from showing during boot, and prevent the system from trying to boot the Windows GUI.
I have used these two lines on all other machines with no problems.
The [OPTIONS] section is at the very start of the MSDOS.SYS file.

The MSDOS.SYS file IS NOT some 1000 bytes, but only about 50 bytes.
This also is exactly the same as previous computers I've used this method on. Seeing as Windows was never installed, and the boot-disk was only ever used to format and sys the C: drive, the MSDOS.SYS file(before adding the options) consists of only the following one line:

;SYS

The file is only 5 bytes long(four characters and one EOF byte).

KEYS THAT WILL NOT WORK ARE:

Y,U,H,J,N,M.

This poses quite a problem, as you cannot do anything in the BIOS, as you need Y/N to confirm changes - so you cannot even exit from the BIOS - you have to switch off the power while the BIOS is still on the screen...(which I don't like to do)

If you boot-up from a Win95/98 boot-disk, then the "M"'s do NOT appear, but all the keys mentioned above still do not work...

If you boot-up from a DOS 6.22 disk, then the same thing as with the Win95 boot-disk happens: No "M"'s, but those 6 keys still will not work.

Interestingly, most keyboard's internal matricies have these six keys connected to the same common key matrix, so sorta looks like a failure of the keyboard interpreter chip inside the laptop...
:(
In all my dealings with PC's, I've never heard of the keyboard chip failing - even old 286 PC's are still going fine with there old keyboard chips...

Also, according to the manual, you plug in an external keyboard into the PS/2 socket and power-on the laptop. The laptop will find an external keyboard, and use this instead of the internal one. When you do this, the same "M"'s happen, and the external keyboard DOES NOT WORK - no keys on it work at all, although you can see it blink it's CAPS, NUM & SCROLL lights, so the ext. board is at least getting power from the PS/2 socket, and is initalizing, but the laptop is not acknowledging it...
You have to hit the internal keyboard's [ENTER] key or [SPACEBAR] to stop the "M"'s. With the "M"'s stopped, you still cannot use the ext. board...

Thank you very much for your suggestions!
:)

I've looked on the Toshiba site, but all I can find, is the annoying Ask Iris thing, which provides a great many FAQ's but no way to contact someone there in the know about how their machines work, to pose a question such as I am doing here...


MM.