Assistance/Advice for Portege R100

I recently purchased a used Portege R100 for light usage as a secondary computer. It worked great for a month or so. I had it plugged in to a projector to do a Power Point presentation, set everything up, and we all went to have lunch. When I got back, there was a message on the screen that a kernel was missing (I can't remember exactly what it said) and I need to insert the recovery disk or Windows (not sure).

Since I purchased the computer used, I don't have the system recovery disk, though I see they're easy to purchase and not expensive. However, I also don't have the external CD drive, and they're impossible to find at an affordable price.

Here's a possibly hopeless n00bie question--Is there any way I can take the information from the recovery disks and put them on a USB drive and use that as a recovery medium?

I have located a local repair facility. If I can't do the USB drive thing, would they be able to do the recovery? I'm guessing if they are a Toshiba approved facility, they would have all the equipment.

Is there some other solution I'm not seeing? Thanks in advance for advice.

 

If you can copy the CD contents to a large USB drive and somehow get it to boot, I don't know if it would still work properly. I think that your only option is to get the Portege DVD drive or an external USB DVD drive (which I cannot guarantee that you will be able to boot from it, but it is a possibility). Hope this helps.

-J.B.

 

That's what I figured, but thought I would ask. Thanks for the response.