I began by going to bios and setting the cdrom drive as the primary boot drive and disabled all other boot sources except for the hard drive which i left as secondary.
after that i saved, and resetted the computer with the xp cd in the drive. It booted up fine, and loaded all the drivers as well, but when it gets to the "setup is starting windows" screen it hangs.
i thought it was a hard drive problem so i swapped it out with an extra hard drive i had lying around but i still get the same problem.
does anyone have any idea what the problem might be? i'm thinking that i might need to use a restore disc directly from toshiba.
if anyone can verify this, i'll go ahead and order one right away unless you might no a place i can pick up a disc for cheaper.