update M400 BIOS in Windows 7

Hi all,

I recently bought a second-hand (read: children-abused) Toshiba Portege M400 tablet from my friend. It has been abused like it was damned by his 3 children, but it works well for netbook purposes. The only truly broken feature is the broken, and thus removed, DVD drive. The WACOM screen/pen, card reader, biometrics, etc all work as they should.

The tablet came with Windows Vista, and upon reception I wiped the drive and installed Windows 7 via PXE (long story, but it turns out Toshiba made the dumb move to disallow their customers to boot from normal external/USB drives or other devices). Now when I try to update the BIOS from within Windows 7, I get an error message saying that my operating system is not supported. By Googling a bit, I read that the BIOS updaters can only be run within a Toshiba-installed Windows installation such as XP or Vista. This tablet didn't come with any recovery discs or a recovery partition.

Is there any way to update the BIOS still, given that I don't have any means to use Toshiba's suggested methods? The BIOS updater comes with instructions (1) boot from DVD, (2) install from Windows, (3) boot from floppy. Only method 3 is left, and I doubt that this Toshiba will boot from my IBM USB floppy drive.

Suggestions? Advice? I tried doing a search for this issue, but I couldn't find anything amongst the many irrelevant threads that came up. Apologies if I missed anything.

Thanks,
daver

 

Does silence mean that I am basically SOL in terms of updating the BIOS without either an internal CD/DVD drive or a copy of the Toshiba recovery partition?

 

Hey Daver. I saw your post and have no idea how to tackle your problem.

However, you might want to try Toshiba support forums:
Laptops - Toshiba Forums

OR the Portege Forums:
Portégé Laptops - Toshiba Forums

I think the BIOS can also be run from a CD-ROM option [I think it's a different file, as I too recently updated my bios] (maybe buy an external ROM for about $60?). Many people on that site seem to like to CDROM option: Qosmio X505 - Q880 and BIOS version 2.90 for Qosmi... - Toshiba Forums

Hope you have better luck there.

Keep us updated.

 

Hi alexmuw,

Thanks for your post. I searched high and low for support, but I can find nothing more than a polite "it's not going to work" from everybody. The reason being is that the Portege series of Toshiba computers are picky suckers - they don't allow you to boot off anything that isn't Toshiba recognized (very Apple-esque). Apparently there are a few external optical drives which Portege's will recognize, but it's not worth spending over $100 for (the tablet itself only cost me that much). I have 2 external DVD drives at home, but both of them are self-assembled (and one of them is eSata so that's definitely out of the question).

The 2 problems I face is that I do not have the original Windows XP Tablet Edition recovery CDs that came with this tablet PC, nor do I have a Toshiba-acceptable optical drive that I can boot from.

My final resort (and I quite certain this will work), but which will take the most amount of time, is to
1) create a complete backup image of the entire hard disk
2) PXE boot a Toshiba Win XP Pro CD from one of our office computers
3) run the BIOS installer from there
4) PXE boot a recovery DVD and restore the original Windows 7 image created earlier

feasible? yes. worth the effort? we'll see.

I only want to update the BIOS because I always get an error from a piece of Toshiba software (necessary for Windows to recognize the WACOM screen) bugging me that I'm using an unsupported operating system. The current BIOS is 1.6 written for Windows XP, it doesn't even support Windows Vista!

 

Good luck with the recovery. Keep us updated with the progress

 

I've booted my M400 from a Lexar Lighting II usb thumb drive, (my M400 is long gone). You can make DOS USB boot drive and Flash from there or you can use Compatability and use the Vista Flash Utility. If I remember that is what I did. I used Win 7 on my M400 until I sold it...

 

i've tried that many times, using the Toshiba utility to reformat at least 3 USB sticks to no avail. this includes a 256MB, 1GB and a 16GB stick. each time the Flashing utility reports an error that the thumb drive could not be reformatted, even though I can use the regular Windows formatter without any problems.

 

I didn't use the Toshiba format utility, I baiscally created a DOS boot iso and did an xcopy from the mounted iso using the /e/f/s switches and from there I extracted the winphlash16.exe, support files and the ROM file, copied them to the newly minted DOS boot disk and flashed the BIOS.

 

a kind soul from tabletpcreview.com provided me with a VFD file, with the "abracadabra" filename that turned a SD card into a bootable Win98 DOS floppy. unfortunately, the darn BIOS installer (Toshiba's own DOS installer files) wouldn't allow it: it complain about not working under V86 mode.

at this time, I'm sticking with my aforementioned procedure from above:
-back up hard disk to an image
-network boot and install Windows XP Tablet Edition
-run the BIOS installer from WinXP TE

I am currently in step 2 (it's taking an unusually long time, but i attribute that to the PXE install).

@jnjroach,
appreciate the advice, but i don't feel bold enough to do a winphlash. perhaps you could list out the steps to create a bootable SD/USB with the BIOS updater? it sounds like you took a vanilla bootable DOS image and then ran xcopy to copy over the necessary Toshiba BIOS files. what are the "/e/ f/s" switches for?

 

Sounds promising. Keep us updated with the progress as in the future someone else might need the information in this post.

Good luck

 

Actually I found an old DOS Boot ISO and mounted it using Virtual Clone Drive, took a 1GB Thumb Drive and did the xcopy, the switches tell xcopy to copy hidden directories, empty directories basically create an exact copy of the ISO, once I had that I extracted the the BIOS files using 7zip into a folder, found the Winphlash16.exe and support files as well as the ROM file and copied those to the thumb drive. I booted to thumb drive and once I was to the prompt I ran the Winphlash16.exe or phlash16.exe, you may need to look up the exact switch to point it to the ROM.

If I still had my M400 it would be easier...sorry