Toshiba Portege

[Rob]

hi all,

i have recently aquired a toshiba portege 3440ct laptop, it has nt on it at the mo but has a few other probs - sometime crashes etc and has a lot of crap on it.

now i want to install 98se on it BUT prob is it has no floppy and only a pcmia cd drive.

xp cd will boot the machine up and start to load but after 1 or 2 mins i get an error message

what are my options - or can i do a re install of nt from within nt? ie u can click setup on w98 while 98 is running and it will run the set up again.

any ideas???

or if anyone has a recovery cd for toshiba let me know!

[Fidgits]

do you have a 98 CD?

You should be able to install any windows O/S - it'll just keep asking you if your sure!

[Rob]

yes have a 98 cd ( not an original one tho) it wont boot from that (dont think its a bootable cd ). if i put it in whilst nt is running i get the start screen and then it says i cant install from within nt and to use dos, BUT if i go into dos i can access the cd drive as its pcmia based

know how to make the 98 disk bootable?

[ColinBarber]

May be possible to copy the OS disc to the HDD and run install from there.

I guess the problem is once the first part of the OS loads when installing there isn't a USB driver for it to access the CD drive?

If you get really stuck I may be able to get hold of a recovery CD. Both my wife and myself worked for Toshiba Informations Systems UK in the past.

[Rob]

hi colin,

sorry for confusion, the floppy is USB based but the cdrom is pcmia based and u can use a hot key to boot from cd during startup, so assume that the cd info is in the bios?

i tried the xp disk when nt is running and it says i need a service pack for nt, will look on the MS site for an update

[mikeyboy]

Hi Colin,

To make a cd bootable you need a bootable floppy and something like nero to burn the image onto the front end of the disk. The disk will actually come up blank under windows explorer but when booted will appear as the A: drive.

windows 98 installation disks are generally bootable.

In this case i'd erarse your exisitng partition - fdisk

Reinstate the c: partition and copy over the windows files onto the HDD into something like

c:\windows\options\cabs

under DOS you can run up the windows setup installer from there and it should install.

You can't 'downgrade' NT to 98. Service Pack 6a is the last NT service pack. And don't forget you'll need cd drivers on your boot floppy - if you haven't got these don't start doing anything!

Hope that helps - as you can tell I might have done this before - but you'd better be patient your gonna need a few drivers for the tosh.

[ColinBarber]

Hi Colin,

←

Hello but I think you mean Fluff ;)

[mikeyboy]

hmm probably

too much real ale at lunch

Hi Everbody, burp.