Batboard

From someone who is basically computer illiterate I'm looking for some assistance on getting a few ToughBooks going. Here's the story: Picked up (4) at auction prior owner was a FD that was using these in apparatus. (F keys have been assigned tags such as 'enroute', 'at scene' 'hospital', etc). I looked under the hood and all have Seagate HD's and 16mB RAM chip cards. One has a Sierra cellular and seperate modem card, all have a chunk taken out of the door where the cards plug in I assume to pass wiring so all might have been using Sierra or some card (possibly GPS). They all power up and go thru the copyright statement and what looks like 'decompletion or dissambely prohibited' very fast, I've powered up the machines about 20X and real fast that's what it appears to be, don't know if this is a normal statement that comes up with some computers, the few I've had never said that. Then computer gives you the press F1 for setup statement. One machine will go to setup if you press the F1
on the other 3 pressing F1 has no effect. Next thing you get is the flashing cursor and the keys don't have any effect other than the Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot. When I got these a year ago (and haven't fussed with them since) I recall on one machine I was able to run a ChemTrec program that it contained and there was also a 'M' program in it that allowed you to bring up dispatch history. Anyone have any ideas ?

Do any have A: or CD drives to boot from?

You seldom know what your getting into when you by decommisoned govt. computers. These things are OLD and have probably had a very busy life in an unfriendly environment. Best thing you can do if all the hardware is good is just wipe the drives and load a fresh O/S like Windows 95/98, or Linux, and go from there.

Sounds like at least a couple of them may have some keyboard issues, maybe not though, it's tough to tell without having them in front of me.

Do you have any idea what operating system they are running (if any)?

Appreciate the responses. I have a total of (4), (2) of them were in-apparatus and have the F keys marked as above. Yes, these (2) are a bit beat up. The other (2) are pretty clean and don't appear that they were in apparatus but do come from the same township. Guess I bit off too much here as my computer knowledge is 1 step above non-existent so any help would be appreciated. On the (2) good shape machines here's what I get on powerup.

Chips 65558 PCI and VL accelerated VGA Bios Video BIOS ver. 2.8.1
Decompilation or Dissassembly Prohibited
Copyright (c) 1996 Chips & Technologies Inc. All rights reserved

then:
Copyright IBM Corporation 1981.1997 All rights reserved Copyright (c) Matsushita Electric/Industrial Co.LTD 1992-1997 Ver 1.20-L21 Press F1 for setup

Both units will go into setup if F1 is pressed, if not pressed computer #1 will show a flashing cursor for about a minute then go to a screen were an illustration comes up showing you to put a floppy in the drive . There's also a flashing arrow on the screen pointing to the F1 key. If you press the F1 key display will show a 6 digit # with a flashing cursor and stays this way till shut down.


So I don't know if these have an operating system and both of these do have CD drives (even though the one prompts you for what looks like a floppy).

On the in apparatus machines 1 has a floppy drive the other a CD.

I'd like to get one working to hang onto for my road trips, sound do-able for an amateur ?

Sounds like some of them have had there hard drives wiped, you may need to reload the os. They didn't come with any recovery cd's by chance did they? I used to have some for cf-25's, but pitched them a while back, maybe someone else has one. At least you got a cd rom drives in 2, most just came with floppy's.

I agree. What you are describing on the 2 better condition units sounds like they have no operating system at all. They are powering on and then basically asking you to load a DOS program or install an o/s, so they can go to work.

The other 2 with the tags on the F keys are probably the same. By the way, those overlays on the F keys will not alter the original F key assignment. For example, if "Enroute" was assigned to F-2, then that key is still F-2 on any other application. Those were just put there for reference for the many different users in the apparatus.