[Splat]

®®®, on Jan 8 2005, 03:43 AM, said:

Anybody has experience in getting  a TOSHiBA Satellite 5000/5100/5200/Dynabook to boot from an USB Stick?

Somehow it's not possible (for me or generally) even though an external USB floppy drive CAN successfully be booted from 

Must be a BIOS limitation i figured.

Hi ®®®,

This my first post on this forum... great job you and the other guys are doing unofficially supporting the trusty Toshiba 5200 series.

In answer to your question... yes it is possible to boot from a USB key on a Toshiba Satellite 5200 series laptop. The trick is to ensure that the USB key fully supports USB-FDD booting. Booting from USB-ZIP or USB-HDD is not supported by the BIOS on the 5200 series or most Toshibas I have tried.

One example is the Netac U230. This is available in sizes from 128MB to 1GB

http://www.weast.co....alog/netac.html

More information can be also found at

http://www.netac.com

I have successfully been able to boot from this on my 5205-S750, then implement USB hard drives from within DOS.

For implementing USB devices in DOS, check out this excellent article by madmaxUSB below.

http://www.computing...orum/15568.html

[®®®]

Wow great news I need that mentioned USB stick definitely.

Btw i didn't know that there's a 750 model. What exact is your Toshiba 5200 model? Can you post your NERD file?

[Splat]

Oops... having a dyslexic moment. It is in actual fact a 5205-S705.

I did upgrade a few components on it though (system board and GPU are still stock).

[®®®]

I see I would love to know if the U230 is USB2.0 as it's not explicetely explained at their website. They say "High speed access, compatible with USB 2.0" which obviously is a marketing gag , because in the table found HERE they state:
...
USB Host Interface USB 1.1/1.0 specifications
...

Btw the SWISSBIT USB stick i got (Twist 256 MB USB2.0 Hi-Speed) has also USB-FDD, USB-HDD and USB-ZIP Boot capabilities. But booting from it doesn't work
I have to check the prices and availablity here in Germany for the NETAC and give it a try.

[Bill]

Does anybody know anything about booting from a NIC card?
My new BIOS supports booting from my internal NIC as well as a NIC in the docking station. (old BIOS [I8200] supported booting from NIC too I think)

My new BIOS also supports booting on a gf card on the dock, so if mine ever gets fried or I screw up the BIOS on it.....

[Splat]

®®®, on Sep 9 2005, 07:42 PM, said:

I see  I would love to know if the U230 is USB2.0 as it's not explicetely explained at their website. They say "High speed access, compatible with USB 2.0" which obviously is a marketing gag , because in the table found HERE they state:
...
USB Host Interface USB 1.1/1.0 specifications
...

Btw the SWISSBIT USB stick i got (Twist 256 MB USB2.0 Hi-Speed) has also USB-FDD, USB-HDD and USB-ZIP Boot capabilities. But booting from it doesn't work
I have to check the prices and availablity here in Germany for the NETAC and give it a try.

Yes the manufacturer's website is contradictory to what the vendor's site implies. I don't know of any way within Windows to show that the device is 2.0 compliant, however I can tell you though that when used with the Matsushita DOS drivers, it does detect it on the EHCI channel as a HS (or high speed) device. Hope that helps.

How is the SwissBit being recognised on Windows? Does it actually emulate a floppy drive? The Netac has a switch on the side from which you can toggle either the USB Mass Storage Controller or it actually emulates a USB Teac floppy drive. It's a minor niggle to have to eject, switch over, then re-insert the USB key, but as a solution it works.

Just guessing, but the problem with the Toshiba BIOS may be that it sees the USB Mass Storage Controller and also the USB Floppy it is emulating, gets confused, then fails to boot just like any standard USB stick? I did try to once boot off a non USB-FDD USB stick with a USB floppy drive plugged also on the Toshiba, and the BIOS just sat on a flashing cursor after POSTing.

I haven't tried any other USB sticks which apparently officially support USB-FDD booting. There are so few nowadays to market. Most just say USB-ZIP or USB-HDD, which is not alot to us with a BIOS which is picky to say the least.

[Bill]

Windows can detect if a device is 2.0 complient, you might need to create some kind of USB2 complient detection program to make it easy, but when you plug a USB2 device in a 1.1 port, windows XP tells you right away that it is highspeed, and should be plugged into a highspeed port. (if you have one)

[®®®]

From reading the specs for the U230 which shows the transfer rates and comparing it to NETAC's USB2.0 devices i would assume U230 is USB1.1
But thanks anyway for the info.

Actually personally that's by far the most useful info for a long time

[Bill]

While I know you must have thought your post was important, you only needed to post it once, not 11 times......
I was able to read it the first 10 times.....

Edit: Was that actually 12 posts? I can't count properly....
Anyway the next mod that comes by will hopefully delete both our posts...

Edit: I was not trying to bash you, I also never did see that last post.

This post has been edited by Bill: 16 September 2005 - 06:56 AM

[®®®]

No problem here, also no problem for Bill. It was not meant to be rude

Cheers

Great info btw

[Bill]

Like he said I was not trying to be rude, sometime I should maybe tell the story of the time I posted more than 10 times in a row.... (on another forum)

Anyway, over here, unlike other forums, we will not pounce on you for accidently posting more than one time in a row.
If you don't do it constantly we won't get upset, unless we just got cut of by some guy waving an ATI card while driving home...

Oh, and that was some great info BTW.

All us mods are really happy people, I think I am the only one not running on beer, however.

This post has been edited by Bill: 18 September 2005 - 01:33 PM

[®®®]

Where can i buy the NETAC u230 in Europe or Geramny? Trying to keep the shipping costs down...

[(= Heazky =)]

You can also format your USB Pendrive as an USB Harddisk (so that it has an MBR). This is easily done in Linux, format with the DOS (FAT16, not 32!!!!) filesystem. Boot with the USB-HDD option.

[Hieiwing]

Did SD CARD Driver of Satellite 5205-S703 support SDIO? I need to use it to support Toshiba Bluetooth SD CARD 3. Rush ...