Microsoft Windows 2000 on a Toshiba Portégé 3110CT

The Portege 3110CT did not include a CD-ROM but aftermarket external CD-ROM drives that connect to the notebook through a PC Card were popular. Even Toshiba sold a third-party one. Unfortunately you cannot configure the system BIOS to boot from a CD-ROM. Also, the standard Windows 2000 installation disks don't recognize the CD-ROM drive, which causes the OS installation to fail.

If you can connect the notebook to a network, you can set up a Microsoft Remote Installation Services (RIS) server and install Windows 2000 from the network. If working from the network is not an option, you can perform the following steps (some of these steps are specific to the Portege 3110CT, but you can modify this process for any CD-ROM driver):

  1. Create an DOS boot diskette - if you no longer have a copy of DOS handy, you can download what you need from http://www.bootdisk.com.
  2. Copy the CD-ROM driver file to the boot diskette.
  3. Edit the config.sys file on the boot disk and add the line
    4. DEVICE=A:\[cddriver].SYS
  4. Edit the autoexec.bat file on the boot diskette and add the line
    5. MSCDEX /D:CD01 /L:E
  5. Insert the boot diskette into your notebook and reboot—the CD-ROM drive should now be accessible as drive E.
  6. If no partition exists on the notebook's hard disk, you must use Fdisk to create one and use the FAT file system to format it.
  7. Insert the Windows 2000 installation CD-ROM, and change to the I386 directory.

  8. Start the installation by typing:
    9. winnt
  9. The Windows 2000 installation will commence and copy the files to the local hard disk. You might want to consider converting the partition to NTFS during installation.
  10. Install the following drivers and utilities. It is important that you install the following modules in the order given.
    1. Toshiba Windows 2000 Common modules for ACPI support (TVALD)
      Requires reboot at this point.
    2. Toshiba Mobile Extensions for Windows 2000
    3. Toshiba Windows 2000 Display Power Save Driver
    4. Toshiba Windows 2000 Power Extensions
    5. Toshiba Windows NT/2000 Utilities
    6. Toshiba Windows 2000 Infrared Port Driver
    7. FDC Condition Software Patch (floppy drive)
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