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how to boot from hdd with no cd or floppy jenny 02-13-2007
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Posted by jenny on February 13, 2007, 10:53 pm
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 I was given a Toshiba Protege Tablet 3505. The external floppy and cd-rom
drive died or are lost. I didn't get them with the tablet. The tablet hdd
needed reformatting but was working.

The BIOS only allows hdd, floppy, cd-rom and lan. I have it set on hdd.
The tablet has two USB connectors but won't boot from them with either
flash or external cd drive.

I took the hdd out of tablet and put it in my main computer via an adapter
and have
reformatted the hdd to FAT32. I then loaded all the files that are
necessary (I
thought based on win98 boot disk downloads from boot.com) plus some extras
to help based on generic boot disks.

I copied the i386 folder from my XP OS disk to the tablet hdd.

I thought I would be able to boot into win98 and then load XP.

But all I get is "Invalid System Disk".

Many hours later, no progress. It is time to ask for help again.




Posted by BR549 on February 13, 2007, 11:25 pm
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>I was given a Toshiba Protege Tablet 3505. The external floppy and cd-rom
> drive died or are lost. I didn't get them with the tablet. The tablet
> hdd
> needed reformatting but was working.
>
> The BIOS only allows hdd, floppy, cd-rom and lan. I have it set on hdd.
> The tablet has two USB connectors but won't boot from them with either
> flash or external cd drive.
>
> I took the hdd out of tablet and put it in my main computer via an
> adapter
> and have
> reformatted the hdd to FAT32. I then loaded all the files that are
> necessary (I
> thought based on win98 boot disk downloads from boot.com) plus some extras
> to help based on generic boot disks.
>
> I copied the i386 folder from my XP OS disk to the tablet hdd.
>
> I thought I would be able to boot into win98 and then load XP.
>
> But all I get is "Invalid System Disk".
>
> Many hours later, no progress. It is time to ask for help again.

Copying the files from a windows 98 boot disk to a hard drive does not make
that hard drive bootable, there's more to it than that. Check here:
http://www.computerhope.com/syshlp.htm



Posted by jenny on February 14, 2007, 7:44 pm
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I am now booting into the Tablet. I included a copy of i386 from my XP
disk.
It seems stuck on the following sentence: "Please wait while Setup copies
files
to your hard drive."

What now??



Posted by P on February 15, 2007, 3:53 am
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>I am now booting into the Tablet. I included a copy of i386 from my XP
>disk.
> It seems stuck on the following sentence: "Please wait while Setup copies
> files
> to your hard drive."
>
> What now??
>
You had to run Smartdrv.exe before running windows setup.
If you didn't do this the installation could need many and many hours.
Bye.



Posted by TDh on February 15, 2007, 6:44 am
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> I was given a Toshiba Protege Tablet 3505. The external floppy and cd-rom
> drive died or are lost.

I've just recently done something similar.

I put my old laptop HD into another laptop.

To install the system files, I formated with 'format c: /s' which I
thought was easier than 'sys c:'.

You'll have to make sure your boot partition is 'active' . I used
GParted for this http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ but you could use
fdisk.

I copied the i386 folder as you did.

Booted the HD back in the original laptop - went to the i386 folder
and ran 'winnt.exe'

As P said, you'll have use Smartdrv.exe to make the installation XP
reasonably quick, I did try without, and it was going to take hours.
If I had my autoexec and config.sys to hand I'd paste them so you
could save some time setting up Smartdrv.exe.

Sorry that its not a very good explanation... but I hope it helps a
bit



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