Hi all, wondering if you guys can give me a hand with a problem I am working on.

I am working on a Toshiba Portege R100 laptop for a client, wich does not boot into windows.
Hard drive test and mem test pass fine, wich i have had to run off of a usb floppy, so I have ruled out a hardware problem. I am able to re-install the OS but i need to back up the clients data 1st.
Now, these laptops do not come with an optical drive and they wont boot off of usb devices. The hard drive is a 1.8" with 50pin connection, thus preventing me from working on it from another computer.

I am able to "force" the windows installer to boot from an external optical drive, through DOS, but i need to run UBCD or UBCD4Win to backup the data and fix the partition/filesystem b4 i can get windows installer to recognise the HDD.

What i need to know is this:
Is there a way to force UBCD to boot the normal way through a DOS command? or am i limited to the DOS apps folder on the CD?

In my searching to resolve this problem, i have seen alot posted about a ubcd dos boot disk, if this is my option, would someone be so kind as to explain it abit to me, as dos is not my strong point.

Thanks alot guys, this thing is driving me crazy!

You can try to boot UBCD from the external optical drive directly
Because you can boot from an USB floppy disk, you can try to put PLoP bootmanager on a floppy.
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

When you boot to PLoP, USB support is added to the BIOS (PLoP is a BIOS extender. Then you can boot from an USB stick when selecting USB in PLoP, so you can boot UBCD or another tool (like a small Linux distribution) from an USB stick.

For backing up data, you better use a small Linux distro like Puppy Linux, Slax, Parted Magic, ... They give you a nice graphical way to copy files you want to keep.

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Download Ultimate Boot CD v5.0: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
Use Parted Magic for handling all partitioning task: http://partedmagic.com/