Any help would be great ! I have a toshiba portege 3110ct notebook ready for an OS install I bought I pcmcia cd-rw off ebay not to long ago its product name is E Best which I had never heard but anyway I have my DOS floppy and My windows 2000 pro bootdisks (4) the setup goes as hoped with the bootdisks until it cant detect the cdrw none of the dos disks i have or the windows disks I have will detect the cdrw because its not ide. I cant find the manufacturer of the drive anywhere on-line and I use this notebook for college classes so getting up and running is high priority. I have basic skills in dos as far as formatting and the basics and I have done clean OS installs more times than I can count , This is really frustrating ... Please Help Thank You for your time

Hi Robert, I think thie gut has it dialed in: http://www.semanchuk.com/philip/560ZInstall.html Very entertaining style, too. M2 If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

There is a fairly universal DOS driver which is listed here for PCMCIA CD drives: http://83.67.55.228/page2.htm You need to customise a boot floppy..... Add the line to CONFIG.SYS: device=arccd.sys /d:cd001 Add the following line to AUTOEXEC.BAT mscdex.exe /d:cd001 If you need MSCDEX.exe file it is available from: http://download.microsoft.com/download/dos622/Utility/2.23/DOS/EN-US/Mscdx223.exe Also see: http://freespace.virgin.net/x86.computers/msdosnt5.htm I found most of these thru the search at top of page..................

All I can say is good luck. I used to fix Toshiba's for a living (well, that was a part of what I did anyhow but certainly not all) and I know that I ran into this situation with a client one time and their Portege. I was told by Toshiba's tech support that there was only one CD-ROM that would work with the Portege and it was sold by them (no surprise) and was worth something ridiculous like $400+. In the end, I got the tech guy to do the OS install on that unit as the client wasn't willing to spend that kind of $. If yours is still under warranty and you can't get that CD-ROM to work, call Toshiba and talk nice, you should be able to get them to do it for you. However, if you're lucky, the above advice/info will help you get yours working. If you do get it working....post back here and let us know as I'm willing to bet you're not the only person with a Portege and this problem....and there's likely to be more coming along behind you as well and this info will come in handy I have no doubt.

Well try every idea you had with no luck. I do appreciate you time and effort though , I spent nearly 3 hours looking for drivers manufactuers specs, anything to aid me. I also contacted Toshiba and they very rather rude by saying "the only thing I can say is GOOD LUCK " and hanging up. Regardless I found a manufacturer of the cd-rom that was packaged with the portege 3110ct @ one time and was able to order a DOS bootable cd-rom with the drivers on diskette for a reasonable price. Thanks again for all your help and for anyone with the same problem I suggest going to www.freecom.com for any drivers/ Hardware.