This is for a friend's Toshiba Portege laptop with Ubuntu 10.4.1 on it. They want the original Windows XP for tablet PC installed; they do have the disk, but the Portege seems unable to boot from a generic non-Toshiba USB CD drive (and the Toshiba one that came with it is broken for years now).
So I found out about plop. I followed the instructions (modified; I touched /etc/grub.d/40_custom or something) and now the executable '/boot/plpbt.bin' (I copied it there of course) is included as an option (I hope! I ran update-grub2 and update-grub and verified that the custom menu option exists in /boot/grub/grub.cfg).
I cannot bring up the grub menu at boot; Esc unfortunately jumps to the Portege BIOS, and I haven't managed to succeed in getting grub to choose the Plop boot manager.
How can I bring up the grub menu on boot?
You can bring up GRUB by pressing SHIFT during boot. If you want to permanently show grub, edit the respective options in
/etc/default/grub.