Toshiba Bilingual Laptop "can't do that - won't do that"

When you buy a Toshiba Laptop, you might have one with two languages, you can choose which to use on first startup. Now if you want to switch from one Language to the other, how does it work? If you enter the Recovery CD, it will always recover the initially chosen language, and it says so on the CD: "Only for recovery of the originally selected language version". But if you put a new harddisk into the laptop, it asks you again for the language of choice. How can you get the other language without a new harddisk?

I had this problem with a English/Chinese Laptop from Hong Kong. I first called up Toshiba Support of course, where someone told me very friendly that this was simply not possible, which I could not believe. The Toshiba representative was smart enough to tell me that it is not possible because "on installation, the unwanted language is deleted from the HD". So I asked how to proceed in case a new HD was installed, and got the answer that then you could then still install any language, which is quite contradictory to the previous statement... I told the guy that I don't need to discuss with him further if he is lying to me and hung up. I realized that somehow the system stores the first selected language on the HD and so I tried a Zero-Fill with killdisk, which did not help. The recovery-CD would still only restore the Chinese format. So I took a closer look at the recovery CD in hope to find something there, and I did find a way to get the language you want. It works fine and installs either of the languages. I really do not understand why Toshiba does not want you to know about this. They probably do not want people to resell the laptop afterwards or they are in some legal trouble with Microsoft about it. Well whatever it is, here is how it works:

There is a folder "Bin" on the DVD with interestingly named files such as "hdflag", and a batch-file called "recovery". I started editing the file and found several checks and sets for the languages Chinese and English, but it was a bit cryptic so I started to test around. After 5 minutes, I had the solution:
First, recover from the DVD to the unwanted Language if you do not have an operating system installed.
Then, copy the "Bin"-folder from the first DVD to the harddrive. Open the recovery.bat from the harddisk location and edit it.
First, uncomment the two lines in the end that restart the system so in case you make a mistake you can retry without waiting for a reboot:
Simply put an "echo" in front of "peshutdown.exe" in both occasions within the last 10 lines.
Find the ":FLAGCHK" section in the file and the two calls to HDFLAG.EXE. In the end of the line, you will find the language code for the available languages, in my case TCHINESE and ENGLISH. Edit the line from TCHINESE to ENGLISH, so it chooses English in any case.
Then, edit the TCHPROC in the line IF (%ERRORLEVEL%)==(201) GOTO TCHPROC to ENGPROC.
Save the Batchfile, run it (doubleclick) and reboot, it should ask you now for the Language or install the English version right away.
If you have a different language, I hope you get the pattern. Just make sure that whatever language is chosen, the prefered is picked. I am not sure which one of those steps does the trick, and I am too lazy to find out, but it works anyhow with quite little changes.