Laptop trouble =/

ChaoticMonk

Member
Sep 21, 2004
43
0
0
Hi guys, I've fond myself in abit of a pickle.

I've recently aquired a Toshiba Portege M2000 notebook and it has no OS installed and no flappy/cd drives.

I tried booting it up with my external cd drive plugged into the USB port and I ended up at a LAN bootup option which I couldnt get past.

After some research I found out that I'd need MSDOS installed in order to get rid of the LAN bootup so I used my exernal USB floppy drive, installed MSDOS and got rid of the LAN bootup option.

I then proceeded to plug my cd drive back into the usb port with my win2k CD inside and after booting up to the C:> prompt I tried switching to D: and E: both of which said nothing was there.

I plugged my USB floppy drive in and that showed up fine so I installed win3.11 hopeing to then upgrade to a better OS from within windows only to find that win3.11 has no USB support.

So basicly, I've now got a laptop with win3.11 and MSDOS installed, able to access an external floppy drive but not a external Cd drive and I wish to install win2k or winxp.

Any suggestions? :s

Thanks in advance!
 

ZoomStop

Senior member
Oct 10, 2005
841
0
76
That laptop seems pretty new... dumb question here but I hate to offer a complex solution when a simple one will suffice... but have you tried booting from the CD drive? You may need to configure USB to be a higher boot priority than the hard drive in the BIOS but with how recent-ish this laptop is I would imagine it could do this.
It would seem that if you can boot from a USB floppy you can boot from a USB CD-Rom.
All XP and Win2K discs are bootable.
 

CrispyFried

Golden Member
May 3, 2005
1,122
0
0
if the above doesnt work (boot from usb cdrom) then dl dos usb drivers.. they fit on a 1.4 bootable floppy (Ill see if I can find the link) and copy the setup files from the cdrom to the hd and run setup from there.

edit: check the links and insrructions here.

and here is my config.sys from a boot disk:
------------------------------
files=10
buffers=10
dos=high,umb
stacks=9,256
lastdrive=z

device=himem.sys
device=USBASPI.SYS /W
device=Di1000dd.SYS
------------------------------

I use it to ghost my notebook to a usb hd once a week.
 

ChaoticMonk

Member
Sep 21, 2004
43
0
0
First off, thanks for the super speedy replies.

I managed to download the driver and extracted the exe, went into the F2H dir and found the USBASPI.SYS file but I have no clue what to do with it to get it working in DOS and I have no idea what you posted your config.sys details for =/
 

ZoomStop

Senior member
Oct 10, 2005
841
0
76
to use the USB driver all you should need to do is add
device=USBASPI.SYS /W
to your CONFIG.SYS file and re-boot. Assuming your USBASPI is in a mapped path. Just toss the USBASPI.SYS into the root (C:\) and add that line to your config sys.
I am not framiliar enough with this particular driver to tell if you need to put anything else into your CONFIG.SYS or your AUTOEXEC.BAT but at least this should get you a step closer.