Tablet PC

[Rik_]

Hi all, thought I'd ask for a little help for a change.

I have a tablet PC at work with a corrupted Windows XP tablet install on it.
I have tried everything I can think of to recover it but nothing does the job.

I have decided to reinstall it seeing as I have it's original cd. The problem is, it being a tablet, it has no cd drive. It also had no option for usb cdrom or "other device" in it's bios (which I have been through with a fine tooth comb). The only boot option other than it's hdd is pcmcia cd rom, and guess what, I haven't got one of those.

The idea I had was to remove the hdd, plug it up to my laptop (via a usb adapter), throw the windows cd contents onto it and install it. The only problem is I don't know how to get it to boot into windows setup rather than the current non-working install.

Any ideas would be greatly apreciated as I really want to get this tablet going so that I can do a bit of hand drawing with it for fun!

[PhilliePhan]

Hey Rik,

I found this - I imagine if you work in a shop you'd have the needed ingredients:

- So i tried reinstalling with the my desktop and it doesn't work. It will load the os but it wont load into windows.

- You can reinstall windows this way: If you have an external hard drive that accepts IDE drives.

What youll need: External IDE hard drive and Desktop DVD or CD Rom.

How To:

1. Open up your external hard drive. Make sure it's an IDE connection.
2. Remove the IDE hard drive. Power cable and IDE cable.
3. Remove your DVD or CD ROM from your desktop
3. Plug the power and IDE cable from your external to your DVD or CD ROM.
4. Connect it to your tablet and boot from removable drives.

I just recently upgraded my hard drive to a 120GB 5400RPM and reinstalled with XP PRO. Works fine without any issues. I plan on ordering a XP Tablet Edition recovery soon.

Reinstall-Tablet-XP-OS-w-o-external-optical-drive

PP:)

[Rik_]

Unfortunately that wont work as it will not boot from any usb device at all!

But thanx anyhow! :)

[PhilliePhan]

My bad! I completely missed where you said that in the first place (doh!)

It's a shame you can't use a pen drive or something easy :)

[caperjack]

just theroy never actually done it ,if you put the drive in your laptop and add windows i386 content,[i386 files would have to on a seperate partition it think to install xp on other partition ]maybe you could then boot the f8 option and chose safe mode with command promp ,and then find you way to what you added and run setup from there.
also ,im wondering if it would be possiable to access i386 file on a thumb drive from the command prompt

[gerbil]

"The idea I had was to remove the hdd, plug it up to my laptop (via a usb adapter), throw the windows cd contents onto it and install it."

Well, roughly that... what you should do is pull the hdd and plug it into another system using some adapter, as you suggest.
Format that hdd; let's say you give it a drive letter G:
Then with the installation cd inserted into that secondary sys [as, say, D:], use the cmd window to run winnt32.exe with the following switches:
d:\i386\winnt32 /syspart:g: /tempdrive:g: /makelocalsource /noreboot
When that phase completes the sys will pause; to ensure that your new system partition will be C: and not G: you must delete the MIGRATE.INF file in G:\$WIN_NT.~BT\
Reinstall the hdd back into the tablet and power up. Setup should continue. Or give an error... :)
[that cmd line runs the Setup phase that copies the temp files required to G:, marks it as Active, copies all other installation files over so the cd is not required again, and halts; if you then don't delete MIGRATE.INF your system partition would remain as G:, which you likely would not want].

[gerbil]

So... did you get it working, Rik?

[Rik_]

Sorry, yeah I did. After having formatted the hard drive with my laptop, it then allowed booting from USB cd rom. It is now running nicely, just gotta decide what other software to throw on it! :)

[gerbil]

Okay. Hope you didn't run the second phase of Setup in your lappy instead of in the tablet...

[Rik_]

I formatted with my laptop then put the drive back into the tablet and installed via the USB cd rom drive!