A friend of mine told me she needed a computer she'd been given wiped and set up again. What she did not tell me until I saw the thing, was that it's a 1996 Toshiba Tecra 500CDT laptop. And what I didn't realize till after the fact is that this thing does not boot from a CD. So I deleted and re-created the partition drive, effectively wiping all the info...and now I can't get the **** thing to do anything. The BIOS screen doesn't even come up, so I don't know how to get into the set up menu to tell it to boot from a floppy.

When you first turn it on, at the bottom does it say "Press [Key] to enter setup"?
That key is normally F1, F2, or Delete but I suppose it could be different

Sometimes F8.

Before I could get into the setup by holding esc and then pressing f1 when prompted, now the BIOS screen doesnt come up at all

So are you just getting a blank screen now?

I'm getting a screen with the manufacturers info (toshiba, 1996 blah blah) and the KB memory count. Pretty much as soon as the screen catches up to the computer turning on, not even a BIOS screen anymore

I'll ask about the BIOS program, but it's sounding a bit wonkey-donkey. if you can get a USB Floppy disk, you can downloaded the needed set up files Here