Windows 7 install with usb key on a toshiba portege 3500 tablet

[missingxtension]

So i am going to make a very broad tutorial so that at least someone with the same problem knows what I did and adapt it to their own situation.

The problem:    I have 2 Toshiba portege 3500 tablet pcs that have no cd rom and very little in  the way of installing windows. It turns out that Toshiba decided that only approved devices were bootable. So that basically leaves everyone sol, in other words the apple approach.

Solution:    Well the solution is to use plob as from the windows boot menu then use a usb cdkey with windows 7 setup files.

warnings: It is extremely slow

The good stuff:  What i did first is to format a 4 gig usb pen drive and copy the contents of windows 7 into it. Okay i did the hard way, but Microsoft has a program that does all the goodies for you. download the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool  http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool.
Since I didn't use this method i don't know exactly how the program works. But if you have vista or windows 7 already do what i did from here http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/how_to_install_windows_7_beta_a_usb_key.

Once you have that ready, you can take a the hard drive you want to use and format it ntfs. Then you can take a cdrom to install the plop boot loader.

Once again i didn't do it the easy way because of circumstances. I half installed windows, since the disc i had didn't have recovery console available (automated). After the text install finished copying files, i booted into another windows machine and connected the hard drive as an external installed plop into the boot.ini, i erazed all the folders and still have the boot loader (do not delete any files that are not folders eg boot.ini, ntldr, winnt).

The hard part was finding out how to make plop boot the usb key. I kept on crashing with an xo and then plop would hang reading the usb key. What i did was go into the set up of plop, and then force usb1.0 mode 2 support. Other wise it would not boot.
I also had problems because one machine only had 256mb of ram, so once the windows loader finished it would crash of a irq_not_less_or_equal bsod. But it seems to work just fine with a 128+256mb.

You're wondering why not install xp/linux on that laptop it would be easier. Well let me tell you, plop wont boot any of my external usb cdrom adapters, plus i wanted the laptop to run two programs and that's it. I didnt want to use wine because the programs are so big i would never know for sure if it everything worked (200gigs). BT4 runs great on this little machines. Even x11 has good tablet support, you just have to replace the minipci wifi.

Thank you for your 0's and 1's the boot loader sure is impressive.
I could tell that from the start i would be able to do what i needed, Unlike grub.

p.s. Time to load win7 installer about 15-20 minutes, 7% of installation took about 60-70 minutes on top of that, 21% another hour on top, 31% seems like it took about 30 minutes on top, so its been going on for about 3 hours now. Be prepared for it to be slow, but it works so wonderful. Llike elmar said "a bit slower and it works is better than its faster but it hangs"

[Elmar]

cool that it works

3 hours are really long. i am sure, you was very nervous the first 15 minutes

best regards
elmar