Toshiba Portege boot from CD media

[BirchyBoy]

Can anyone help? I've been asked to fix a faulty Toshiba Portege laptop with WinXP installed. I'm fairly sure that running a Windows repair with fix this but....

The laptop isn't equipped with a CD or FDD drive. I've got hold of a USB floppy and a USB CD player but I can work out how to boot from either. The toshiba manual suggests that you can only boot from the optional Toshiba CD rom (which I dont have)

If you press F12 on startup you get a number of icons to choose as the primary boot, unfortunately none of these 'read' the USB floppy or CDRom that I have. Toshiba don't have a BIOS edit option but do this via Windows control panel, which I can't get to!!!!!

Anybody have any ideas how to get round this? Thanks!

 

[waga2222]

Hi,

After spending a couple of hours I was able to get to my USB CD-Rom to work and recover my Portege 3500.

In order to get to the BIOS, Press ESC when you reboot and then press F1. This will take you to the bios.

I have downloaded a boot floppy image from

http://www.chevalier.net/toshiba_notebook_faq/.

I ran th excutable which created the boot floppy for me. My External CD-Rom is an old IDE Sony driver and I am using an external Case which connects to my Portege via USB. I also have an extrenal USB FDD.

One more tip incase you need a boot disk. Go to

http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/.

I used their latest boot disk to image my laptop before running the recovery. It works fine.

Hopefully this helps.

Thank you.