Portégé Laptops

[sapporama]

I'm trying to downgrade the Vista (pre-installed) to XP Tablet Edition (from recovery dvds) on my Portege Tablet M700. Unfortunately, it does not come with an optical drive so I had to use a usb external dvd drive (LG). But, when booting the laptop, the external dvd drive was not detected and it is gone to the Vista (already setup the boot sequence in bios to start from cd/dvd).

1) Is there any usb external dvd drive that can boot the portege m700 (either from Toshiba or other brands)?

2) I heard the portege 2000 will boot from an external dvd drive with a pc card connector. Is that right?

3) If so, can I use an adapter (pc card to usb ports) to connect the M700 to external drive?

Will be very appreciated, if you can give any suggestions/comments.

[Pensacola_Tiger]

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sapporama wrote:

I'm trying to downgrade the Vista (pre-installed) to XP Tablet Edition (from recovery dvds) on my Portege Tablet M700. Unfortunately, it does not come with an optical drive so I had to use a usb external dvd drive (LG). But, when booting the laptop, the external dvd drive was not detected and it is gone to the Vista (already setup the boot sequence in bios to start from cd/dvd).

1) Is there any usb external dvd drive that can boot the portege m700 (either from Toshiba or other brands)?

2) I heard the portege 2000 will boot from an external dvd drive with a pc card connector. Is that right?

3) If so, can I use an adapter (pc card to usb ports) to connect the M700 to external drive?

Will be very appreciated, if you can give any suggestions/comments.

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The specs for the Portege M700 Series show an ultra slimbay with a DVD-RW/CD-RW drive.  What happened to yours?

[sapporama]

Mine does not have one. I decided to buy this one because I thought that will make it a little lighter and also I already have one external dvd drive. Too bad, I hadn't been aware of this compatibility issue until now.

[Pensacola_Tiger]

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sapporama wrote:

Mine does not have one. I decided to buy this one because I thought that will make it a little lighter and also I already have one external dvd drive. Too bad, I hadn't been aware of this compatibility issue until now.

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It's doubtful that Toshiba enabled booting from any external drive if the laptop had an internal drive, at least none of them I've seen were so enabled.

You can buy a drive for your Portege from http://www.sparepartswarehouse.com.  A note of caution, your Portege will likely not work correctly from a generic drive of the same model as the genuiine Toshiba part, so buy the real Toshiba part, not a generic drive from a supplier who has the Toshiba drive in stock.  Yeah, it's a bunch more money, but that's just the way it is.