Portégé Laptops

[portegefan]

I have Portege R600-4202 and am very disappointed in the fact that the BIOS does not support eSATA or SD card boot options. For such an expensive and well engineered laptop, this should not be the case.  When will there be a BIOS update to support this ?

[Techman]

Press F12 when powering on to get the boot device menu.  That will show what it can boot from.

If you are looking for a response from Toshiba you will need to call them, as this forum is just for people like you and me to help each other.

[Jerry_Lippey]

Portege R600-S4202 

According to the User's Guide (pp. 154-155), you can boot from an SD card. But I don't see any provision to boot from the eSATA connection. As you say, it should be possible.

   Portégé R600 Series User's Guide

[portegefan]

The problem with the SD card boot is that they can only emulate a virtual floppy disk. So they basically take a floppy disk image and throw it on the SD card.  Every other manufacturer just supports the SD card as just another USB device and avoiding the emulation issues.

For my usage, I use SD cards to boot live linux distros and I like the fact they fit in the SD card slot snuggly.  I don't have to worry about a USB flash drive sticking out.  I keep ghost/acronis backups of my system on the large SD card, this way I can quickly recover.

[Jerry_Lippey]

You have my sympathy. (Personally, I would prefer to boot from an externally-connected SATA drive.)

But as Techman says, we are just users like you.

[yeyidogan]

I have A305 S6994E and have the same problem.

I want to use linux without using on board hdd.

I have 1 TB ext hdd and it is sleeping in my home due to booting esata problem.

I bought this laptop before 4 months ago. There is no bios update until now.

If I know that, I don't buy this laptop

[portegefan]

Has anyone had success using the Portege R600 BIOS Update to get eSATA to boot ? I have not had any success.

Quoting from the changelog:

Version 3.00 - 2009-10-16

• Implemented the INTEL specification for the Mobile Intel 45 Express Chipset (Cantiga) to improve stability.
• Changed the BIOS Setup Menu for Virtualization Technology from Enable/Disable to Disable/VT-x&VT-d/VT-x Only/VT-d Only.
• Added eSATA HDD boot support.
• Fixed: Internal USB devices may be shown as removable devices in the Windows 7 "Devices and Printers" window.
• Improved "resume from hibernation" stability.
• Improved boot stability when the Computrace function is enabled.