William,
I'm trying to re-install WinXP on a Toshiba Portege 3500. I've followed your directions carefully, DOS 7.1 went in with no hitch, copied the I386 and Smartdrv.exe onto the drive, put the drive back into the tablet, and it booted up in DOS just fine. I did the installation start, but when the tablet reboots to continue installing WinXP, it says "Disk error, press any key to restart." I tried that a few times, with the same result. Any ideas? Thanks for your attention and any help you may be able to render!