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Installing Windows XP Pro without an Internal CD-ROM

Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 6:49 pm
by snsd
Hi:

I have a Toshiba M200 Tablet PC. It has no internal optical drive. I have an external USB floppy drive and an external CD burner. The PC also has a built-in SD Card reader.

I cannot boot the PC from the external CD burner. Is there a way to boot the PC from the external USB floppy or the built-in SD Card reader so that I can then load Windows from the external burner? Any help in this regard would be appreciated.

Dave

Posted: Thu Apr 27, 2006 7:36 am
by baronvonfoxbat7734
I had to do this a while ago with the Tishiba Portege laptops. No internal CD Drive and it won't boot from the PCMCIA CD drive that came with it. I had to create a custom bootdisk from Toshiba to get it to make the drive bootable.

I would check again on Toshiba's support site for this info. I believe you can make a bootable floppy that will allow you to run the CD Drive. It won't make the CD bootable but it will allow you to run it from DOS.

Other than that... Copy the i386 folder locally on the machine and bootup with a dos bootable floppy and run the installer from dos. Problem with that though is you can't format the drive doing it that way...

Installing Windows without an internal CD ROM

Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 3:31 am
by snsd
Thanks for the response.

I actually called Toshiba's helpline and they weren't very helpful! They claimed that they don't have any solutions and that I was on my own unless I purchased a specific external CD ROM drive from them.

I'm pretty sure that all I need to do is as you suggest create a boot disk with USB drivers for my external CD burner - but I'm not exactly sure how that's done.

Thanks for the help.

Dave