Recovery without CD drive

I have a Toshiba Portege without a CD drive. I should definitely reinstall windows, since it's way too messed up. Problem is, I don't have a CD drive. It didn't come with the laptop, and I never bothered buying one. I do have a USB drive, but I'm not sure that can be used with the recovery CD.

Any suggestions?

I suspect the recovery CD will remove everything from the hard drive, so installing from another partition won't work.

I have a network card, a USB CD drive, a USB pendrive. Not sure how to find an original PCMCIA CD-drive.

 

you can install from network, if you can select in bios that boot from network is pritority 1.

zx5000 :: 2.4M :: 512 DDR :: 40gb 4200 RPM HD :: 15.4" :: Radeon 9600 Mobilty M10 :: Aquamark3 22,856

 

I'm kind of in the same boat. I have a Libretto L5 w/o a drive and am working on installing Linux to it. Problem is, there were only 2 or 3 drives made that can be used with this machine as a boot-up drive. I say this because if you do go and purchase an external drive, you want to be sure that your machine will be able to boot from it. If you can gain access to a Windows 2000 disc or machine with the Terminal Server application, you can always do a network install.

Try to see if you can boot from your USB CD drive. In my research for my Libretto, I ran across several articles that talked about booting from a USB thumb drive in order to access an external drive that could not be booted from. It basically involved imaging the pen drive with a boot image and appropriate drivers. If you're feeling.....adventureous, you could probably adapt this method to work with Windows.

 

I found this:

http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm

Maybe something would work?

 

I have a floppy drive too. Only floppy drive I have that still works, grin!

So as long as I can somehow get something on to floppy that will make something on USB work, I can do it that way.

 

Hi Ann,
You should not need any of the DOS drivers at bootdisk.com
Pretty much all newer notebooks have USB support built into the BIOS for just this reason. If Toshiba is selling notebooks without a CDROM drive, then it's a sure thing they support this though the BIOS. Take a look at your BIOS settings and make sure it is enabled. Have you called Toshiba's support line? This is probably a common question they answer.

Jack

 

I hope it does support USB, but I wouldn't count on it. This is not a new model. And the documentation that came with it said that it was supposed to be used with the PCMCIA CD-ROM drive.

 

There's no guarantee that there is USB bootability support in the BIOS, if this is not a "newer" unit, it may have been designed to only work with the designed drive (PCMCIA or docking station). Which exact Portege model do you have? With the older models, you may be able to pull the drive from the unit and connect to another computer to use the RestoreCD. Remove the drive before the system has a chance to restart, plug back into Portege and let it boot. It should then start the setup/detection process and find all the Toshiba hardware. Some of the slightly newer Toshiba Restore CD's have a little protection built into them where they will not install unless in either a Toshiba unit or a specific model.

Big Calhoun,
There is an option you can try, but don't know if it will work. It's a utility to mount ISO images in DOS but don't know how compatible it is with Linux. Can you make a bootable Linux partition and copy the files onto it to do the install?

http://www.computing.net/dos/wwwboard/forum/14481.html

Here's another suggestion I found of installing Linux using a Serial/Laplink cable.

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue65/tag/15.html

-Vb-

 

This one is the 3020CT, with RAM upgrade to the max 96 meg. The recovery CD says it won't work on anything but a Toshiba.

 

I guess they've already applied the security feature to the CD's. You can try the site you listed to see if it will work with your USB CDROM drive.
Another option is to installed the OS using a stand alone OS CD and not from the Restore discs. I'm assuming you have 95 or 98 installed already, do you have a 95 or 98 OS CD? If you do, the drive can be pulled out and put into a desktop, but you have to buy an adapter for this to work, make drive bootable and then copy all files onto the HDD. Plug drive back into notebook and boot, it'll put to to DOS, just run setup from the files you just copied in and it will start the install process from all the files you copied from the CD to the HDD.
These are generally the same steps I took to install Win98 into my Portege 3015CT. It's a pain becaue you have to buy the adapter, but since I already had one, it was easy for me. The adapters probably only cost about $20 max, it's a notebook HDD to IDE HDD adapter.

-Vb-

 

Generic USB drives didn't work with my tiny VAIO and with my newer R100. I just bought a Tosh DVD drive from eBay. End of problem.

Installing of the network? How do I map to my desktop CD drive?

 

I already have an adapter. But opening the laptop and taking the hard drive out and then in again is way too fiddly. It's something I'd like to avoid. I mean, it's not like there's a specific bay for the hard drive, so it's way fiddlier than any other laptop I've done that to.

So I'm looking for alternative options.

 

I have a Toshiba L10 Satellite,and the CD-ROM IS bad,and my hard-drive is not recocnise enymore.
What can i do to remove the protection to can accept the hard drive,how to remove the protection from the recovery disc to can use a external CD-ROM Drive