Tried to install ReactOS on a Toshiba Portege M200. It didn't go really well.
My biggest beef with ROS has always been that it isn't setup to install FROM harddisk (which is how I always install Windows). You can't start the installer from DOS. I was entertaining the idea of trying to write my own util to start it, but it seems pointless at the moment. The situation has somewhat improved because they now have the INSTALLFREELDR program to create a boot sector that can start their installer. Except this program doesn't run from DOS, and it only creates the boot sector IN the actual boot sector, which means I had to immediately use a sector editor to capture the ROS boot sector and restore the NT one. Because according to their wiki, their installer will save the old boot sector but it won't add it to their boot menu, so when you get a non-working ROS install (like I ultimately did) then you can't boot NT/DOS anymore and you have an unbootable system which is dumb.
With that out of the way, I went through the text mode installer. The files in their boot ISO are in a directory called ReactOS and the default install directory is also ReactOS. So when I hit enter a cryptic error message came up saying I can't install to the same directory and that I had to reboot. But it didn't actually reboot. So I entered a different name and moved on. Later I get a prompt about installing a boot loader, which I don't want for reasons already mentioned, so I chose to skip it. As a result the FREELDR.INI didn't get updated so I couldn't move ahead to the second phase of the install until I edited it manually to boot ROS instead of the text mode setup program.
Trying to boot the second phase froze at SWENUM. Apparently they have big problems with their USB drivers right now that cause this. A suggested fix is to remove/rename the USB?HCI files in the SYSTEM32\DRIVERS dir. On this laptop, going into the BIOS and disabling legacy USB kb/mouse/floppy emulation also seemed to work. The rest of the install was able to complete then. But the OS doesn't actually work, as it reaches a screen that says "press ctrl-alt-delete to begin" where pressing ctrl-alt-del (or any other keys) does nothing.
Aaaand the ReactOS forum is now unusable as it has captchas on it, so I post my story here instead 😀