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DarrenJacksonFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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toshiba portege 3500 bootup via cdrom

Gents

This question has probably been bounced around a few times but I am after a way of re-installing my tablet pc xp os via a bootable cd the software i get is of course on cd but the bios doesnt support usb cdrom I have the ability to boot up via a usb floppy drive but am wondering if i can get a set of dos drivers that i can incorporate into a bootable floppy that will enable the usb cdrom.

The cd i get is a toshiba restore cd so i cant run it from within the os.

if it helps i can still bootup my tablet but it is dire need of a restore.

The usb cd rom is a iomega dvd writer

I am also interested in any other way that it may be possible ie copy the contents to a formatted hd then boot up as i opened up the autexec.bat file within  the cd to find that it creates a drive x to start of the install.
Im wondering if i cant bootup via a cd i could copy the cd's to the disk then boot up to a drive x then run it manually from within their but i do not know enough about boot disks to do this

Any ideas

Darren
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bobo_tech

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bobo tech thanks for the reply

I was not told that i needed this drive when i purchased this laptop so i am am bit p'-&£$ed off to be honest but i contatced toshiba and they told me that to copy the cd to the hd would not work but i will try at least but for it to work i thin i need the drive to marked as drive x not the standard c can you help
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ITcrow


You must've got a 'Configuration Builder' floppy with your system. This floppy could assist you with installation from CD. As it has drivers on it.

Copying the contents to hard-drive will also work, if you know how to copy them. When booting from the CDROM installation data is
unpacked and kept in X:.

You will probably notice that if you look at CDROM it shows only 1.4 MB data on it. This is the same data you could copy on a bootable floppy.

If you wish to copy CD contents, copy the date from X: to HDD and then invoke winnt32.exe, iinstaller should take from there.

Copying data from CDROM to HDD can only be done, if you could see X: I am hoping, you already know how to copy that data, as you mentioned the copy part.
The links I gave you basically show how to make a usb boot floppy that will work with most usb cdrom drives.  You just need to pick the correct driver and the bulid the floppy in that manner.  Then you would change to the cdrom drive once the system booted up to the floppy (if its setup to be the X drive, then you just type x: and enter at the prompt to get to the cdrom drive0 and then you copy the i386 folder from the cd to the hard drive and then you change to the hard drive (type c: and enter) and then launch setup from there.

You will have to fdisk and format the drive first though.  You might need a windows 98 boot floppy to do that though.  You can get a standard boot floppy from www.bootdisk.com

bobo tech many thanks for the weblinks they where spot on

Cheers

Darren