Question about bootable external drives and laptop BIOS

[dcdomain]

I'm looking into the various drive solutions for the Portege 2000 as listed below. I'm hoping someone can give me some insight as to what may or may not work. This all pertains to a scenario where the harddrive is formatted and from there I'm looking into loading an OS (WinXP) without having to take out the harddrive and swapping it into another laptop with a built in cd-rom drive. Thanks in advance!

Boot from a USB floppy drive (seems like the older models of the Porteges support USB floppy drives) and then load drivers for a pcmcia/cardbus DVD-Rom Drive. Problem is, I don't see a DOS driver for the drive on the Archos manufacturer website. I do see Win9x and NT/2k drivers for the MiniDVD and a DOS driver for the MiniCD. I'm guessing the MiniCD DOS driver won't work for the MiniDVD right?

Boot from this way cool USB flash memory stick and then try to continue with the CD-rom/DVD-rom drive installation in the first scenario?

Boot from this Portege PORT external CD-Rom drive which I'm pretty sure works because there are DOS drivers available. But is it bootable? Meaning do I definitely need to load DOS drivers from a diskette before using?

In the ideal world, I would need to only buy the DVD-Rom drive and have that bootable without DOS drivers. But I'm thinking that won't happen anytime soon.

So it seems as though my only option is to buy either the USB floppy drive or the bootable memory stick along with the PORT CD-Rom drive if I'm looking to install an OS from scratch. From there, if I want to watch DVD's I will then have to go buy the DVD-Rom and install that in a Windows environment.

Or if the PORT CD-Rom drive is bootable, I could just buy that... but how would I format and partition the harddrive without a DOS bootup disk? I know during the installation of WinXP I will probably have the option of formatting the harddrive, but what about partitioning and formatting?

 

[bacillus]

you don't need a dos bootdisk to partition & format if you're going to install xp.
just bootup with the xp cd & you'll be able to do it from there.

 

[dcdomain]

So I guess as long as the drive is bootable. I really have no need for a floppy or that cool USB flash memory stick. Guess that purchase can wait... hmmm, so used to doing everything from a bootdisk though.

 

[wabbiter]

i'm going to receive one of these soon, and I already have the pcmcia cdrom drive, so we will see if it boots off the cdrom drive.

It should boot directly from the toshiba pcmcia cdrom drive from bios, actually, because toshiba ships the drive with the unit if you order direct.

as far as booting from a usb floppy drive, I wish! Will have to see... I figured a bootable cdrom drive was infinitely more useful, since you can install most popular OS's that way.