Portege 3505 laptop does not recognize external drive
My Portege 3505 laptop cannot go to Windows after fail in splitting partition by partition magic. I tried to boot from USB drive but it doesn’t recognize the USB. It happen the same with external Toshiba DVD Rom which connect to the laptop by a cardbus card. I tried to boot by a floppy disk, it was OK but didn’t recognize the USB or DVD ROM( I used a software of HP to boot from floppy disk and can use CDROM). Please help me to make my laptop recognize the USB or DVD ROM on DOS!!!
Not sure if you can see the USB drive or external DVD drive in DOS on this model, but you have to be able to boot from the external DVD drive.
In order to reinstall the operating system using the external DVD dive you have to follow these steps:
1. Connect the external DVD drive to the laptop through the PC card slot.
2. Open up the DVD drive and insert the recovery disc or a generic Windows XP disc.
3. Turn on the laptop and press F12 as soon as Toshiba logo appears on the screen. Select the DVD drive from the boot menu.
I don’t know why you want to see the external USB device or DVD drive in DOS, but if you are trying to recover personal data from the hard drive you can use the following methods.
1. Easy one. You can use external USB enclosure for laptop hard drives. Remove the hard drive from the laptop, install it into the enclosure, connect this enclosure to another computer via USB port. Access the hard drive through My Computer and backup the data.
2. Difficult one. Boot the laptop from Knoppix CD – live Linux CD with GUI interface. Connect an external hard drive or flash drive (has to be formatted with FAT32) to the laptop using the USB port, this device should be detected by Knoppix. Transfer all data from the laptop to the external drive. I believe before you can write to an external drive in Knoppix you have to set this drive to be writable.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Thank you very much for reply!
October 30th, 2007 at 12:19 am
sorry i need to ask a question i didnt no where else to post this i need help bad some please
i made a big mistake i have a toshiba tecra a3 laptop i formated the hard drive before realising i didnt get a recovery cd with my laptop when i bought it
therefore i didnt create a recovery disk now im stuck i need a recovery disk and i dont no how to get one is there any way i can get one from someone or download one or something or is that illeagal??
I NEED HELP PLEASE
October 30th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Shaun,
You can call Toshiba and purchase the recovery disc from them. It shouldn’t be very expensive. One of my customer was able to get it for about $40.
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:08 am
I’m having a problem similar to the original poster, I recently had to replace the internal DVD-RAM drive in my Toshiba Satellite M45 S355. I replaced it with an Optiarc drive (Model number: AD-7540A) that I got from a Sony external slim drive, but now I can’t boot from the internal drive. Is there anything I can do about this?
Thanks in advance,
Don
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:04 am
You mentioned on original answer that you can ” Connect the external DVD drive to the laptop through the PC card slot”. How to do that?
I have old dell inspiron 8100. the dvd drive just won’t read a thing, so when the hard drive failed – I re-install XP by connecting the hard drive to my desktop. Then, when I put the hard drive back into the laptop it just hang at mup.sys (googled that and suspect that it keeps hanging because XP was installed on the desktop instead on the laptop — different specs, etc). So, when you mentioned that we can connect the external DVD drive to the laptop through the PC card slot — I thought I can use that to re-install XP again on the laptop using my desktop internal dvd drive.
Please help — Thanks!
December 5th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
A135-s2386. Vista. Won’t recognize USB devices. Using Bios V1.4. Wiped disk, loaded XP, smae problem. Reloaded Vista. Same problem. Toshiba, so called tech, says hardware. ??
December 5th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Bob Booker,
Sounds like a problem with the system board. Apparently, the USB controller (integrated into the system board) is fried.
March 28th, 2009 at 6:33 am
hello,I have a toshiba portege 3500,it is complete but without a hdd,I replaced this,but the ext cd wont let me run the recovery disks.After releasing F12 and choosing cd drive,i get screen message insert recovery cd and press any button,again and again.the cd drive runs ok when the pc lead is dissconected,but as soon as the lead is inserted it goes dead,even if not connected to the computer.If you could help i would be most grateful,thanks Richard