A USB pendrive should work, if it uses a FAT file system. In the following I'll try to describe how you set up the USB pendrive on your WinXP system to help booting your notebook with the firmware extension. Further steps then depend on how you are going to use it in the future (e.g. co-existance of several OS on the notebook).
In the following I assume that the file system in question on the USB pendrive is 'K:'.
(1) Download the extension on the XP system (for a direct link see above in reply #3). Note: If you want to ensure the integrity of the download you'll have to also download the 'firmware.tcz.md5.txt' file. Use this for verification, but that's up to you how far you want to go.
(2) Set up of the USB pendrive using the following commands
mkdir K:\tce\optional
copy firmware.tcz K:\tce\optional
echo firmware.tcz >> K:\tce\onboot.lst
Note: I was not sure about the last command, since it creates a MS-DOS text file (with surplus 'Carriage Return' characters). But it seems to have worked fine in my quick test.
(3) Remove the USB pendrive from your XP system, attach it to your notebook, and boot using the TC 3.2 CD-ROM. It is important that you use a boot code of 'waitusb=15' to give your system time to properly recognise the TC extension on your USB pendrive. If 15 seconds works, you can try with a lower value, if it fails increase it.
Here are a couple of commands to check things out:
- With cat /opt/.tce_dir you can see whether TC has recognised your USB pendrive properly. If the value is '/tmp/tce' you are still in the (default) "cloud mode".
- With ls /tmp/tcloop you could see a list of loop-mounted (i.e. installed) extensions. You obviously want to make sure that 'firmware' is listed there.
If things have worked up to this point I'd imagine that the NIC related messages in the 'dmesg' output are different. I trust you have some idea of how to check out the (hopefully working) network setup.
From this point onwards you should have a TC system with internet access. You could initially continue with the USB pendrive setup, and install additional extentions to the USB pendrive.
Moving forward you really will have to carefully read the "standard" documentation (e.g. the FAQ, the install page, the concepts page and relevant Wiki pages). This is for you to determin which kind of installation you want. A simple way could be to "clone" the 'tce' directory from your USB stick onto your FAT file system on the notebook. Whilst this should work (at least in theory) I for one don't consider it the best option (e.g. in terms of performance). All those questions of which boot loader to use, boot from CD-ROM or hard disk, what kind of target filesystem, advanced persitence options, etc. might still be ahead of you.