Update: I have applied the BIOS update by putting the old hard disk back in, and using the working windows install there to do it. It still can’t see all 4G of my RAM.
Apologies for this slight rant. I need to get it off my chest.
I have a Toshiba Portege M400 (3G) laptop which I bought just over a year ago. It had a 100GB hard disk which initially came with Windows XP pre-installed. The very first thing I did was wipe Windows off and install Ubuntu. I wasn’t entirely happy because the system ran slowly. It turns out that a BIOS update from Toshiba fixes this. Unfortunately the particular BIOS update can only be installed from within Windows running on the bare metal.
I booted off an Ubuntu Live CD and copied the contents of my Ubuntu partition from the hard disk to a USB attached hard drive. I then used the Toshiba XP recovery CD which came with the laptop to wipe the drive again, and install a minimal-sized (10G) Windows XP Professional setup. I then booted to it and installed the BIOS update and the system became much quicker. I then reinstalled Ubuntu on the remaining space and copied back all my data from the USB disk.
Everything was fine.
I now use Ubuntu daily and only use Windows when I am using the 3G card built into the laptop – which doesn’t work in Ubuntu (bug filed here:- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/128556 )
Skip forward to this month. I started running out of disk space in Ubuntu so I bought myself a nice new 320G disk. Here’s how I migrated from the 100G disk to the 320G one.
1. Connect a USB hard disk. 2. Boot to ubuntu live cd. 3. dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/disk/windows.img # this backed up my Windows XP install to a file. 4. mount /dev/sda2 # root (/) filesystem for ubuntu 5. mount /dev/sda3 # home (/home) filesystem for ubuntu 6. rsync -avz /mnt/sda2/* /media/disk/ubuntu/root/ # backup root filesystem 7. rsync -avz /mnt/sda3/* /media/disk/ubuntu/home/ # backup home filesystem
I then yanked the 100G disk out and slapped in the 320G disk and again booted to the Ubuntu Live CD. Using similar tools as above I partitioned and copied everything back onto the disk. I happily use Ubuntu and all my data is intact.
However, Windows refuses to boot. I get the Windows splash screen (where you get the bouncing blue bar) and then it bluescreens and reboots. This repeats.
I have mounted the Windows filesystem from within Ubuntu to make sure it’s sane and it looks good. The usual files are all there. When I reboot I of course get the usual “We’re sorry” and am offered a “Safe Mode” option. This fails in the same way.
A kind guy at work loaned me a proper XP CD (not these silly recovery ones you get with laptops these days) so that I might use the “recovery” option. However when I choose that, Windows says it can’t find any hard disks because (presumably) it doesn’t have the driver for the SATA controller my laptop has.
The reason I _need_ to use Windows is because there is a new BIOS update for the laptop, and I need to install it. 64-bit Ubuntu can’t see all 4G of memory in the laptop – which it should. Installing the BIOS update will eliminate that from the list of possible causes. I can’t install the BIOS update without Windows however.
So my pain is summarised by:-
1. Windows wont boot and I don't know how to make it boot 2. Windows XP CD can't see the SATA controller without a driver disk (I have no floppy drive) 3. I have to use Windows to install Toshiba BIOS updates
So far the only thing I can think of doing is putting the _old_ hard disk back in the machine and using that (working) Windows install to do the BIOS update. In fact, I could of course keep that 100G disk just for Windows, and only put it in the machine when I need this kind of BIOS sillyness. Then I could remove Windows from my new 320G disk, thus giving me 10G back.
End of rant. Carry on.
The good news is that I’m off out for a curry with my colleagues from work at lunchtime.
54 Comments
I downloaded a BIOS update for a Toshiba laptop the other day – I just opened the EXE in “Archive Manager” (File Roller) and extracted the contents – which contained an ISO I could burn to CD to complete the BIOS update.
Try opening the EXE in an archive manager – you never know what files you’ll find inside!
A good suggestion. I’ve done this myself with HP updates in the past, and they’ve had .bin files inside which I could work with. Unfortunately this nasty Toshiba BIOS update is a real proper windows executable. Running it under WINE I was hoping that it would dump out the contents somewhere. It popped up a dialog “extracting” with a little progress bar. WINE then barfs with “Could not execute file!” and I can’t find any trace of the extracted bits (if indeed they are extracted to disk – they may have only been extracted in memory of course).
http://popey.com/~alan/P003Cv380.exe is the BIOS update in question.
Of course I have no guarantee this will fix the “4G” problem that I have, given Toshiba don’t provide any release notes with their BIOS updates. Seriously, this is the last Toshiba laptop I’ll buy – even if it does have nice open Intel hardware inside, Toshiba seem to want to fuck up the experience for me.
Yeah, a good curry always cheers me up too! Shame you can’t get good curries in Australia! Fortunately back in the UK next month..
You said you have a Portege M400. http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/downloads/pm400v380.exe is the latest bios update for it from Toshiba. You can run unzip in a console and it will dump the contents of the exe. Included in the exe (all of Toshiba’s official bios updates) is an iso file. The file you linked to above is just the Windows exe not the full update package.
It’s an M400 3G.
http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe.com/cgi-bin/ToshibaCSG/download_drivers_bios.jsp
Product type: Notebook
Family: Portege
Product series: Portege M Series
Model: Portege M400 (3G)
Driver type: BIOS Update
Search–>
http://support1.toshiba-tro.de/tedd-files2/0/bios-20080530120945.zip
http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe.com/cgi-bin/ToshibaCSG/download_driver_details.jsp?service=EU&selCategory=2&selFamily=4&selSeries=157&selProduct=694&selShortMod=null&language=13&selOS=all&selType=4&yearupload=&monthupload=&dayupload=&useDate=null&mode=allMachines&search=&action=search&macId=&country=all&selectedLanguage=13&type=4&page=1&ID=62741&OSID=-1&driverLanguage=42
http://support1.toshiba-tro.de/tedd-files2/0/bios-20080530120945.zip
Which results in this file:- http://popey.com/~alan/P003Cv380.exe
Which is a Windows Executable. Observe:-
alan@bishop:~/public_html$ file P003Cv380.exe P003Cv380.exe: MS-DOS executable PE for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit alan@bishop:~/public_html$ unzip P003Cv380.exe Archive: P003Cv380.exe End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on the last disk(s) of this archive. unzip: cannot find zipfile directory in one of P003Cv380.exe or P003Cv380.exe.zip, and cannot find P003Cv380.exe.ZIP, period.I have downloaded the update you refer to and you’re right, it can be unpacked, but this is the list of devices it’s for:-
The M400 3G isn’t on that list. Unless Toshiba have some special code for the 3G I don’t know about of course.
if it’s possible the update you mention is compatible with my laptop, but I dont know that..
It doesn’t like to be copied from one disk to another. I suppose maybe it stores info like the UUID and refuses to boot if the UUID doesn’t match or something. So yeah, put the old disk back in to do the BIOS update.
Like you suggest at the end of your article, I would keep windows on a completely different HDD and forget about it unless you need windows.
When I uninstalled Windows, installed Ubuntu/partitioned, then reinstalled Windows on my Dell Inspiron (which has a SATA HDD) my Windows couldn’t identify a drive to boot from, either. I had to go into the BIOS and switch my hard drive type over from SATA to ATA or something like that.. I’d go check in my BIOS, but I don’t want to restart.
I recently did something similar with my daughter’s laptop. XP would reboot continuously. IIRC, it turned out that I forgot to mark the windows partition as bootable. I used fdisk to do that and all was well.
Yeah, I think you’re right, that’s the best course of action.
I’ve put the old disk in now, and will try the BIOS update, not that I believe it will fix the 4G issue :S
Ooo, that’s a suggestion I hadn’t considered, although I am sure in fdisk I saw a * next to that partition. I’ll check it when I switch back to the new disk! Thanks!
I checked, it is.
Recovery disks are a PITA. The laptop I have for work doesn’t even come with recovery disk but rather a tool to build them yourself.
What you can do is find a torrent for an XP home or pro (depending on what the license sticker on your laptop says) OEM cd with SP3 integrated and maybe even some sata drivers included. I can’t see how this would be illegal as you would be using the valid OEM license key from the sticker on your laptop and after all isn’t it the license to use the software that you are actually paying for?. Of course if you actually want to use the install you will need to get drivers from Toshiba but I find that far less troublesome than trying to uninstall all the crapware that often accompanies those recovery cds. I ussually use Acronis TrueImage to make a backup of the fresh install, it seems strange that dd didn’t work considering its doing something quite similar.
If you can’t find an image with the sata drivers incorporated then, as others have suggested, you can create a custom cd from the image using nLite, you can even make it a automated install so you don’t have to worry about answering questions every 10 minutes (that should be asked at the start of the install).
Hi Alan
This a known issue. Last time I checked if you use the server kernel you’ ll see the extra RAM.
The startupmanager package may help setting server kernel as your default boot option unless you already know how to go about /boot/grub/menu.lst.
Good luck.
Windows XP and 2000 have never and as far as I can tell never will support anything other then standard floppy drives for the “Press F6″ driver installer… I actually carry a bare floppy drive around in my toolkit just for moments like this, although it won’t work for laptops…
Nlite is the best option…
I think the Windows Vista installer probably supports more then just floppy, but I’m not really familiar with it.
.. those have sata support or just shrink the windows installation to a minimum ( about 3 Gig ) and only use the rest of the hard disk for linux.
Although, if you really hate windows why did you buy it?
Buy a laptop with linux the next time! It is better for everybody 
“Next time”! NEXT TIME!
Never!
This is a year old, so pre-SP3. The CD I used _has_ SP2 slipstreamed in, so that wouldn’t have done any good either.
I wanted this specific laptop because it had the right combination of hardware at the time. I didn’t want to compromise on the hardware in order to buy one that didn’t have Windows with it. In addition even if I _could_ buy _this_ laptop it wouldn’t stop Toshiba supplying their BIOS updates in a brain dead Windows-only EXE
Unfortunately it looks to be a hardware issue, I have installed the server kernel and it still fails to recognise all 4G.
This sounds very similar to a Linux issue when GRUB specifies the wrong root parition. I’ve discovered with my girl friend’s laptop that MS Windows doesn’t always use the most logical discovery of discs: I can’t remember its equivilent boot loader file (boot.ini?), but in the area where it specified the root partition, it listed the first partition as 1 (I don’t know if it counts from zero, but Windows was on the first partition) but refused to boot. I kept incrementing the number and eventually Windows booted when it read 7 or something like that (there were only 4 partitions).
You should have used Windows LiveCD for the resizing…
There was no resizing done. I backed up the partition on the original disk, put in a new disk, made the _same_ partitions on the new disk and restored.
The update I linked to contains P003Cv380.exe. So this should be the correct update for your notebook. One very nice thing about Toshiba’s bios update ISO’s (I have Satellite U200) is that if you boot the disk and the update is not compatible with your notebook it will tell you and refuse to install.
So.. Windows can’t use USB drives as driver disks yet?
Or, if you’re feeling adventurous: http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/bios/
“Flashing the BIOS from Linux”
Use nlite on a system running windows to build a new XP install disk with the correct sata driver bundled in. It takes a while to do but its useable on alot of systems afterwards.
Also, your Toshiba might have an option to switch the drive controller from ACHI to the older IDE standard then you can use the fixboot command to fix the mbr just make sure that it has the correct sata controller installed and switch back to ACHI and it should work
Thanks for the help. I will give this a go when I get home. I fear I may have to employ the use of a friends machine to help.
I don’t have an XP install disk of my own though. Only a recovery one from Toshiba which doesn’t seem to be a normal Windows setup CD but one of these “blat the image on the disk” jobs.
Heh, have you seen how basic the Toshiba BIOS is!?
Hiya,
I just did a quick bit of Googlefoo and according to this page :
http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe.com/cgi-bin/ToshibaCSG/faq.jsp?service=EU&FID=TRO0000000b07
you should be able to make a bootable floppy/cd to do the update with thus negating the windows dependancy
Would be easier than messing about trying to get a knackered windows install running
I’ve encountered similar scenario’s. I especially dislike the chicken/egg conundrum with Windows XP, some SATA controllers and the need to use a floppy to install the driver. Sane people do not use floppies in this day and age. Why didn’t service pack 1,2 or 3 address that problem? The Windows Bios update silliness is also very frustrating, but a large part of that problem is the hardware manufacturer, in this case Toshiba.
Not the first to recommend PE, I’ll certainly take a look at it. Thanks.
I completely agree. Compare this situation with (for example) my desktop PC of the same vintage. It has a BIOS which has a self-updating feature. You just plug a USB stick in containing the BIOS update and it pulls it from there. The Asus EEE PC is another good example. It updates itself very nicely with no external media required.
Can’t you boot from a USB Harddisk? If so, put the 100G drive in a USB case and boot from it when you need to do something that requires it. My Laptop (an Acer Aspire) that I got on a closeout a couple years back, came with a 40G drive I did the recovery thing then pulled it and replaced it with a virgin 80G and installed Ubuntu. If I need Windows — so far once in two years I plug in the USB and tell the computer to boot from it, voila! Problem Solved, and best of all NO SWAPPING OUT DRIVES!!
I’ve just stumbled across your blog because I was wondering what was in the the 3.80 BIOS update over 3.70 for a Toshiba Portege M400
I suspect the “not seeing all the RAM thing” might be down to you using a 32 bit kernel which didn’t have PAE (judging from your uname output). It would have been more interesting to see if a 64 bit boot CD showed more as that would immediately say if that was the problem (although by now who knows what.
(I too am a Linux user as it happens and yes, that Windows EXE is a pain. I just wish there were release notes for these updates)
(I forgot to say that under a 64 bit Linux I can see all 4Gbytes of my RAM on this Portege)
Interesting. Can you do an “lspci” and “lshw” and post it somewhere. Perhaps it has a different chipset than mine?
Sadly it’s a chipset issue. I have installed 64-bit Ubuntu and tried the 32-bit PAE kernel and it still can’t see more than ~3.3GiB RAM
I dismissed the MBR being the issue because Windows _does_ boot, the various DLLs load then it barfs and reboots just after loading mup.sys.
You may have been better off with nftsclone or partimage for backing up your Windows partition instead of dd.
I agree with the comment about your partition table. When you dd’d your Windows partition, you could also have separately backed up your MBR, with and without the partition table (always a good idea to back up the MBR, e.g.: dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/.mbr bs=512 count=1).
You may still be okay by using a real XP CD and repairing the MBR, then reinstalling GRUB after that. But I think it’s your partition table at issue here, because the geometry of the two disks are necessarily different.
See MBR and Windows issues here:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/backing_up_your_master_boot_record
ntfsclone dev talk:
http://osdir.com/ml/file-systems.ntfs.user/2004-08/msg00009.html
You need the Windows CD or extracted/mounted ISO to use with the BartPE builder. There are various prebuilt BartPE’s on torrent – but considering you have a valid licence, and illegal torrents are evil
, you should build your own. It’s not tricky.
On another machine and it made an unbootable USB key
Also.. I shouldn’t have to resort to using illegal torrents, thus sharing out other peoples copyrighted work (Windows stuff) in order to make a valid version of XP work
Have you given any thought to using a PE disk to do the BIOS upgrade? Not sure it’s possible in your situation but we use them all the time where I work to perform these types of upgrade on different machines.
Hi Alan. Try coping all 100GB harddisk to the 320GB’s one with dd instead of create the partitions on the new hd and comping with rsync. Probably the problem is in the partition table… If you copy all with dd, you will see 220GB of free space to make a new partition.
The partition table seems sane to me.
But I may give you some advice. Why not just using BartPE boot cd to boot into windows from a “livecd” and install your fresh bios? Also there must be some tools out there to dissect your bios update file and reburn onto your bios on linux. Give it a try.. Google helps. Some time ago I managed some notebooks bios update the way I mentioned lately..
Is BartPE legit though, and don’t I need a Windows system to build a BartPE box? Given my only Windows host is current hosed, that’s a problem. I guess I could use the 100G disk, and make a BartPE CD on that for future instances where this might happen.
Worth at least a look (hasn’t worked for me yet)
http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/flashrom
http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/firmware-tools
Didn’t know about them, will take a look, thanks.
You could try to boot dos from an usb-stick and update your bios on this way
This workaround helps me a few days ago!
~ Bernd
Unfortunately the BIOS update is a Windows EXE, not something that works in DOS. Good suggestion though.
I read your article on ubuntu planet. I understand why you hate windows
However… the problem you ran into is well known and there is an easy solution. You “just” need to put the proper SATA-drivers to the Windows XP CD. There are tools that assist you to generate a new CD based on the original one with additional boot and/or system drivers, service-packs , etc.
I used the tool nLite once and it worked easy. You just need another Windows PC (from a friend?) and a Windows XP CD.
http://www.digitgeek.com/how-to-slipstream-sata-drivers-into-xp-cd/
I hope this will solve your problem.
And you seriously expected this to work?!? Notice your comparison is totally unfair since your doing a bit-for-bit copy of the windows partition but not of the linux partition. Also WinXP is pretty old now; vista probably comes with sata drivers.
The reason I did a bit-for-bit copy of Windows was precicely _because_ I expected an rsync of the disk _not_ to work. I expect that a bit-for-bit copy of the disk, copied back onto a partition of exactly the same size _should_ work. Explain to me why it shouldn’t?
I appreciate XP is a little old now, but it’s what came with my PC which is only one year old. Vista probably does come with it, you’re right, but how much disk space does vista take up, and how much would that cost me to get back to a system which was working just fine.
When you first boot the XP CD hit F6 when prompted and give it the floppy for your storage drivers. Then enter recovery console and use the fixboot command.
Unfortunately my laptop has no floppy drive. I’ll see if I can borrow a USB one from somewhere. Thanks.