experience with installing Win7 Ultimate (RTM) on a Toshiba Satellite A350-x6310

Hi All
I would like to share my experience with installing Win7 Ultimate on a Toshiba Satellite A350-x6310: Partitioning, installation, activation with Daz's excellent loader, Vista becoming non-legit, and my workarounds that avoided using a fake-key on Vista (Laptop came with a legit Vista Home Premium key)
My laptop has two hard disks (250 Gb *2) and all installations were done on the First HDD. The First primary partitionwas (probably) the EFI partition, second primary partition Had Vista preinstalled, and Third primary partition was vista recovery.
I had a NTFS partition in the Extended partition (d: in image) where Windows 7 installation was done using a CUSTOM install through the Win7 image burn on to a DVD.
Installation was totally smooth. The road ahead was not!

What all did not work out of the box:
1. TOUCHPAD !!! (Alps touchpad)
2. Web-cam (Chicony 2 USB Camera)
3. Fingerprint sensor
4. Bluetooth
5. HDMI
6. Built in Card-reader (Jmicron)
7. Function Keys (Fn+ F1/F2 ... etc to control )
8. Soft-touch buttons (play / pause / mute etc.)

Some of it was also due to the fact that i had disabled win7 updates (want to preserve the installation from getting invalidated). All in all the system was pretty handicapped. Anyhow went to the toshiba - India website revealed only Vista based drivers for the machine with hardly any Win7 Updates. There is a BIOS for 64 bit win 7 systems which am not willing to install. Am afraid it might mess the 32 bit Vista Installation.
Went online to the Toshiba-worldwide support and guess what, my laptop isn't listed there. Seems its a India / Asia specific model. So I did the next bet thing that I could. the M500 model looked quite similar in specs to my A350 and i dlded the win7 64 bit drivers from m500 support page on toshiba india website.
1. Alps Pointing Device - Touchpad still non functional
3. TOSHIBA SD Utilities 1.9.1.14 - Card readers functional
4. Realtek Audio Driver 6.0.1.5904 - made sound work
5. Dolby Control Center - some sound effects (??)
6. Bluetooth Monitor - made Bluetooth work
7. HDMI Control Manager 2.0.0.1.64 - Yet to check

In addition I dlded the following drivers from the international support site
1. Toshiba Value Added pack util_tvap_TC00215000H -
2. Chicony - driver_camera_chicony_TC70062800B - Web cam and mic functional

With the installation of Toshiba Flash Cards, the Fn keys functions can be accessed by a on screen system but the pressing the Fn combos on the keyboard still don't work. In fact earlier the Vol. and Brightness controls were working and now after installation of the pack they are not!
The touchpad I realized was disabled in Vista as well. Enabling it in Vista (Fn+F9) made it work in Win 7 as well. That was some relief. The Fingerprint sensor driver was proving to be a problem. Therefore I enabled Windows online driver lookup and the same was then dlded by Win7 automatically.
The Fn Keys still dont work Though

Activated the installation using Daz's loader. The system SLIC version is 2.0 (TOSHCPL00). Used a Toshiba SLIC, TOSHIBA cert and Acer key. Daz's loader changed the SLIC type to TOSH(non CLP00) 2.1.
Result, Vista demanded activation again.
I booted into windows 7 > uninstalled Daz's loader > Used NAPALUM's windows 7 Loader Extreme Edition ver 3 > selected TOSCPL100 as SLIC: INSTALL > Utimate OEM Key : INSTALL > TOSCPL Certificate: INSTALL > REBOOT
Win 7 is now actiavted

Re-booted to Vista > Changed product key > Typed my Legit Key > Activate

Beautiful !

Will see how it runs for a few more weeks before taking a final call on removing vista.

Also it it may be on interest, I have a /BOOT partition on HDD2 and FEDORA and UBUNTU installed on HDD2 in Ext4/3 partitions. For them, GRUB was installed in the teh First Sector of their Boot partitions and I was using Windows BCD to log into them. Luckily, nothing has changed after installation of Win7. I just have one more entry at the BCD screen at the time of logging in (Win7, Vista, Fedora, Ubuntu)
I would highly recommend EasyBCD method to anyone wishing to have a multiboot system with any of the current flavours of Linux

CHEERS to DAz and Napalum (probably hes on some other Board) and all the really helpful tutorials on MDL boards

Thanks Guys

 

Also a thought is occuring to me that probably I dont need the Ultimate edition, Win7 professional edition will do. Also there is a valid Toshiba Cert. and Toshiba Key available for the Professional edition whereas there is no Toshiba SLP Key available for for the Ultimate.
I am not sure which is the key that was applied by the Napalum's loader (Toshiba or otherwise)
So i guess that is my next goal. installing Win7Professional RTM.
Maddy

 

My System Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo P7350
Motherboard Model: TOSHIBA KTKAA
Motherboard Chipset: Intel PM45 (Cantiga-PM) + ICH9M (Base)
Motherboard Slots: 4xPCI Express x1, 1xPCI Express x16
BIOS Manufacturer: Phoenix Technologies
Alps Pointing-device
Total Memory Size: 3 GBytes 400 MHz
Video Chipset: ATI Mobility RADEON HD 3470 (M82-S) 256 MBytes of DDR2 SDRAM
RealTek Semiconductor RTL8168C/8111C PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
Intel 5100 (Shirley Peak) Wireless WiFi Adapter
Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s : Hitachi HTS543225L9SA00 250 GB x 2
Audio Adapter: Intel 82801IB ICH9 - High Definition Audio [A3]
Audio Adapter: ATI RV620 - High Definition Audio Controller
Fingerprint sensor: AuthenTec Inc. AES1610
Bluetooth Adapter; Device Manufacturer: Broadcom Corp Product Name: TAIYO YUDEN for Toshiba(0x0200)
USB Mass Storage Device: Device Manufacturer: JMicron

 

Thanks Rosco
If that is the case, I will not burden my HDD with another formatted partition.
Maddy