The How

Ludicrous Multibooting

The first design detail when planning to install a large number of OSes on the same disk (the P2010 has space/connector for only one hard disk) is... how to do it. Because I quickly realized the maximum number of primary partitions as many OSes will refuse to install to a logical one. You can try moving them to a logical one afterwards or share boot manager but I felt on the long term it could become a headache. So with this in mind I studied the different boot managers available looking for ways to manage visible partitions so I could fool the BIOS and have a different set of partitions visible on each boot. I pivoted to these three:

• Plop: it's very fancy and enables the P2010 to boot from USB (not an option in the BIOS), but in my limited testing I didn't find a way to effectively do what I needed, I was always limited to four partitions.
• XOSL: it seemed more flexible but I still had the limit on primary partitions, and the menu looked too small for the number of options I wanted to configure.
• BootIt NG: its propiertary, but I ended using it as it's just awesome for my use case, because:
  • It uses an EMBR that allows to show and hide primary partitions at will. So for each OS I can choose to activate only it's primary and the others containing shared data.
  • It shows up to 16 options in the menu, and the rest are in the list one scroll away.
  • The integrated partition manager works like a charm, and can convert partitions between formats without messing the OS boot sector (which happened to me with several other tools).
  • The integrated partition imaging allows quick backups and restores, ideal for reverting when something goes wrong and you don't want to spend other 30 min installing from sratch.

Here's a partial sneak peek of the project (there're some more OSes scrolling down). You may notice some icons are not the stock ones integrated in BootIt NG, yes I managed to create custom ones using Photoshop 5 and the custom palette and tool included with more modern versions of BootIt NG. I've compiled everything on this file, but for using it as is you just need to place the file "Icon16.dat" on the BootIt NG installation folder.

Be aware that BootIT NG says it's 30 days shareware, but in my experience it randomly (it did it twice to me, the first one a few days after installing it), even with a valid registration key applied, will show a message saying "*WARNING* The evaluation period of BootIT NG has expired", leaving you apparently stuck. Fortunately if you wait some seconds it'll still load to the menu, and secondly you just need to delete the file "Bootitng.opt" to revert this to normal operation.

External media

Regarding the additional hardware needed, I used the following:

• External USB floppy drive (LaCie) and a pack of 10 1,44Mb floppies. For install disks.
• 32GB CF card (Transcend 133x) for faster disk access, although I'll probably try later using the original 1,8" HDD for more "authentic" feel. I needed an 1,8" IDE to CF adapter, easily available online.

For the OS installation files, I created a FAT16 logical partition data of 510MB for Pre-Windows95 OS, located on the first 8GB of the disk (to allow MS-DOS to see it), and another larger FAT32 one at the end of the disk for later OS installation files and storing the partition backups; I also installed BootIt NG on there.

• I copied all the CAB files there so after booting from floppy I could just run the install from the HDD without taking space on the OS partition.
• I fortunately managed to avoid using a CD-ROM drive and disks on all the cases.
• I could probably have used Plop Boot on a Floppy + USB drive boot but this just worked fine, was faster and allowed me to play with floppies which added some extra retro feeling.

Once the OS is up and running, fortunately in many cases I managed to connect it to my Ethernet home LAN, and then to the QNAP NAS where I store all the software, so Applications installation was done from network drive most of the times, avoiding file copying by physical media. Kudos to QNAP for making so easy to enable SMBv1 so the NAS works seamlessly on all these OSes without extra tweaking on their side.

The supported: Windows XP and 2000 (and 2003 Server R1/R2)

Ok, enough preparations. Let's start navigating the calm surface waters of the officially supported OSes before start diving on more dangerous deep waters. Windows XP and 2000 were the target OS of the P2010 so they had all the needed drivers and software preinstalled and available to download on Tosiba support site. Sounds easy but, guess what? Unfortunately downloads were removed long ago, so they're difficult to find even when using the Wayback Machine.

Fortunately an angel compiled all the downloads and information, uploaded it to GitHub and created a replica of the Toshiba/Dynabook Support Page, including the ones for the P2010 and P2000. Thanks to this effort setting up our laptop after OS installation is a breeze.

On top of getting not so easy to spot drivers for the video card, sound card, infrared, SD card, modem, etc, Toshiba also created some utilities that are really useful and integrated with the hardware:

• "Toshiba Display Hotkey Utility" enables the keyboard hotkeys that dim the brightness of the integrated display.
• You may need to install before "Toshiba ACPI Common Modules" which also enable the suspend keyboard hotkeys.
• "Toshiba Power Saver" allows to change the power profile without rebooting to the BIOS.
• Multiple tools for enabling/disabling different hardware elements like the touchpad, WiFi, etc.
• For the road warriors "Toshiba Mobile Extension" allows to quickly change the IP networking configuration between different presets.

Once the OS is up and running, the next thing I did was research the period correct versions of the different widely used Apps so each OS install has the right Apps version installed, to mimic the real experience of the user of that OS in particular. For this, WinWorld and win3x.org are fantastic resources for browsing their extensive catalogue and become aware of the evolution OS and Apps underwent during the 20 years I was able to cover with this build. Some recommendations:

• Internet Explorer 5 by default, upgradeable to 6 or 7
• Office XP and Works 6 suites
• Lotus SmartSuite 9.8
• Corel WordPerfect Office 11
• Netscape 6/7
• Mozilla 1.0
• Opera Browser 6/7
• Adobe Acrobat 5
• Adobe Photoshop 6
• Paint Shop Pro 7
• Corel Draw 11
• Adobe Illustrator 10
• Encarta 2000 Library and Atlas
• Visual Studio .NET
• Borland Delphi 7
• Borland JBuilder 9
• Borland C++ Builder 6
• Eclipse 2.0/2.1
• NetBeans 3.5
• Macromedia Dreamweaver MX
• Macromedia Flash MX
• Adobe Premiere 6.5
• Winamp 3
• Sonique 1.96
• Mathcad 11
• Cool Edit Pro 2.0
• Sound Forge 6.0
• GoldWave 5.0
• ACDSee 5
• Autodesk AutoCAD 2004
• 3DS Max 5
• Maya 5.0
• Bryce 5
• Norton SystemWorks 2001
• Winrar 3.x
• Daemon Tools 3.x
• Alcohol 120%
• 3DMark 03

As the Internet browsers of any of these OSes won't be able to load almost any of the modern websites, I recommend configuring the proxy from the wonderful Protoweb Project and browse the Internet as it was at the time. You can even select the speed, from 9.6k dial-up to 256k DSL.

And last but not least, to complete the genuine experience, we can apply all the updates using the wonderful Windows Update Restored project.

In my case, as Spanish is my mother tongue, you can see in the screenshots I hunted for localized versions of OSes and Apps both as a extra challenge and as a more personal experience.

Windows 98 SE and Millenium

On our backwards OS exploration we reach the last versions based on MS-DOS, before XP initiated the NT based unified era. Here we find the first case (in our travel) of a despised OS (Windows Me, like Vista, 8 ) between two respected ones, and the causes are:

• It introduced new technologies that raised the hardware requirements (CPU, RAM, disk) which forced users to crawl with their current build or spend on a new one.
• These technologies were not optimized yet, so next version OS (XP, 7) will probably be more lean than it's predecessor, and also people had already bought new hardware by then.
• Same happens with drivers, guilty of many BSODs, and are optimized when the next OS version arrives.
• These technological jumps reduce compatibility with older software. In case of Me it was intentional (hidding the MS-DOS layer).

For the Toshiba, this an perhaps Windows 2000 are the sweet spot performance wise. Windows XP is too heavy for it with only 240MB of RAM, probably with the extra 256MB expansion it'd go much better but then perhaps the CPU or the disk would start to be felt slow.

In my experience Me is a fine OS if you don't intend to run MS-DOS software. But for that Windows 2000 offers something similar and much more stable, so it's not surprise that Microsoft were full on NT for XP replacing both 2000 and Me.

For 98 Se and Me the recommended drivers are WDM versions, mainly for the video and sound card. They're not provided officially by Toshiba but can be found, although:

• There're many version of the video drivers that although compatible on paper, I couldn't install.
• Same happens for audio drivers
• The Intel 10/100 drivers that work on Windows 98/ME are the ones that contain the file e100bnt5.sys

I'm attaching the ones that worked for me:

Many of the Windows 2000/XP drivers from previous post work perfectly on Windows 98 (SD card, AGP, PCMCIA, Modem). But USB 2.0 and WiFi unfortunately are no longer supported (at least officially). Dual monitor setup is still supported and will be until Windows 95. No SoundBlaster emulation on any version of drivers, so pure Windows gaming only, this build is geared to desktop usage. Toshiba applications (Fn hotkeys for sleep, dim screen, muste sound, etc) will also work until Windows 95.

Windows Update restored still works on WIndows 98, but only if you update Internet Explorer to the required version, a problem if you want to preserve the integrated one. ProtoWeb proxy of course also works like a charm, using the 56k modem speed version brings an extra level of nostalgia.

Due the frenetic pace of OS evolution, recommended applications are those launched on 1999-2000:

• Microsoft Office 2000
• Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition
• Corel WordPerfect Office 2000
• Adobe Acrobat 4.0
• QuarkXPress 4.1
• Adobe InDesign 1.0
• Internet Explorer 5
• Opera 4.0
• Netscape 6
• mIRC 5.6
• Windows Media Player 7
• Windows Movie Maker
• Winamp 2.6
• RealPlayer 7
• Macromedia Flash 4/5
• Macromedia Dreamweaver 3
• Adobe Photoshop 5.5/6.0
• Adobe Premiere 5.1c
• Adobe After Effects 4.0
• CorelDRAW 9
• Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6
• MusicMatch Jukebox 4.0
• Cool Edit Pro 2000
• Blender 2.0
• ACDSee 3.0
• WinZip 8.0
• WinRAR 2.5
• CloneCD
• Norton Utilities 2000
• VMware Workstation 1.0