That's great that you got the floppy drive from the 480CDT to use with it.

The silver floppy drive that comes with the Portege 3xxx laptops is a Citizen W1D and the belts have gone bad on even those later ones, so you'd need to swap out the belt to use that drive.
I'm surprised the connector matched up, I thought there was a connector pitch difference between the 480CDT caddy and the Portege, at least on my Portege 3010CT.

"PCI Card" - that gets me every time too, it's the Toshiba Fast IR driver 😀

The mouse should work without any drivers, it's emulating a regular PS2 mouse. It could be the same is damaged but beyond that perhaps the trackpoint itself is damaged since those are just some variable resistors that react to pressure. I've seen them fail on laptops that were corroded / dirty enough.

Thank you Thermalwrong. It was indeed the IR. Now everything is well in the driver department 😀

Oh and i need to apologize for my (wrongful) claim that the 480CDT shares the same connector as the portege, they don't. When i bought the 480, i got some periphials with it (including this external floppy) but never reflected on that further as it already have an internal floppy as well. But now when i checked IRL, i noticed that this larger unit and the smaller silver one (that came with the Portege) have the same connector (took a picture of them both). I have no idea what this larger unit is supposed to support 😁 Of course, the 480 on the other hand has a slightly wider connector for its intended external floppy.

I will try to remove the keyboard again and peek carefully if there is something that may have come loose..

Thx again

I have this exact same computer with win 98 install on original HDD. Actually I used it regularly 24 years ago and just held onto it this long, and it's still working. My floppy drive crapped out recently though.

If you need to check anything or you think I might have a driver you need just let me know and I'll see if I can help.

Thank you heaps both Thermalwrongs and dukeofurl for your kind input 😀 Much appreciated.

I think the trackpoint a.k.a "accupoint" gave up on this machine. I carefully removed the keyboard and looked at the small flat-cable but from what i can see, it looks pristine. No big issue as i can use my small usb travelmouse with the machine much more comfortably (and the small scroll-wheel works also which is a very nice bonus).

Oh, i thought the IR package would solve this mysterious driver issue (PCI Card) but after rebooting once again (after installing the 740fir.exe (and after that the 780fir.exe) referenced here: https://support.dynabook.com/support/viewCont … ontentId=106226

but actually found here: https://www.retrospace.net/toshiba/windows_98_files.htm (the 780 version)

I still have the yellow "PCI Card" thing in the device manager. Looking at what resources it occupies, i see I/O range FF60-FF7F which after some googling reveals that it may be related to UHCI USB Controllers (https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=50726) ??

Its no biggie as such as the machine works perfectly fine, but it IS intriguing 😁. And having this thing sorted would be nice at the end of the day. Has it something to do with USB (which works fine)? I did install the NUSB36e from Phils Computerlab earlier (which now makes the system properties proclaim the macine as "Microsoft Windows Me", probably because NUSB packages reuse Windows ME stuff i guess)

To find out what the device is in Windows 98 - go to Start > Run > "hwinfo /ui" minus quotes. Then when that loads, go to view > Problem Devices and you can see the PCI device ID which should help you to find what it really is since you can search for that and usually find definitive answers

Great input Thermalwrong. Thank you.

And i finally managed to fix this 😀

Following your advice i could find the vendor and subsystem (IR).

What DIDN'T work was to try the w98 specific drivers for the IR (740fir98.exe or 780fir98.exe) that i used before, but rather to download the xp package (p349irxp.exe), then using 7zip to extract it and finally point the driver install to the inf-file in this xp package. that did the trick and the IR kick-started immediately (funny enough).

All good. Thx heaps for the help.