Hi - I am trying to replace the hard drive in my wife's Portege 3505. The factory drive has been making a scary intermittent death rattle for some time now and it can't be put off any longer.

So we bought a Seagate 100 gb drive and I have successfully gotten the physical installation done. Now the issue is reloading the OS, Windows, and my wife's electronic world. I downloaded instructions from Toshiba (support doc 98081614) and they require that you build a boot restore disk on a floppy, connected with a USB floppy drive. I was hoping to use a USB jump drive instead, since I don't have a floppy drive (who does anymore?), but the boot agent seems not to see it. I don't have a memory stick handy but have a feeling we'd have the same issue.

My question is this: Is there a way to designate a USB-connected jump drive as a bootable device? Alternatively, is there a way I can pop the new drive into another pc as a secondary drive (perhaps through one of those external enclosure dealies) and set it up as a boot drive before transferring it back into the 3505? I would hate to have to buy an otherwise useless floppy drive just to do this silly thing. Any tips? Please?! Thanks in advance, Ed