Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC recovery

[kegandrew]

I have a Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC. It has no built-in or external CD-
ROM/DVD or Floppy drives. It has bios settings that will allow it to boot
from HDD, FDD, CD-ROM, or LAN. I have the Toshiba Recovery DVD from the
manufacturer. The Toshiba support site lists the supported external CD/DVD
drives that will work with the recovery disk. I don’t have any of these and I
am trying to use a generic DVD drive with an IDE to USB adapter. I am able to
connect the DVD drive (with this adapter) to a computer running XP and I am
able to access DVD’s on that computer. The recovery disk has instructions
that tell me to use an external DVD drive (to perform the recovery) but isn’t
as specific as the website as to which DVD drive to use. As a side note: the
instructions do say that the drive cannot be formatted in NTFS. I think that
I just need to find a way to copy the sys files onto the hard drive and then
copy a generic DVD driver onto the hard drive so I can access the DVD when it
is attached to the Tablet PC. I would greatly appreciate any experience or
suggestions as to how I might get this to work without having to buy one of
these specific DVD drives that the Toshiba Site suggests. Thanks

 

[Rod Speed]

I have a Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC. It has no built-in or
external CD- ROM/DVD or Floppy drives. It has bios settings that will
allow it to boot from HDD, FDD, CD-ROM, or LAN. I have the Toshiba
Recovery DVD from the manufacturer. The Toshiba support site lists
the supported external CD/DVD drives that will work with the recovery
disk. I don't have any of these and I am trying to use a generic DVD
drive with an IDE to USB adapter. I am able to connect the DVD drive
(with this adapter) to a computer running XP and I am able to access
DVD's on that computer. The recovery disk has instructions that tell
me to use an external DVD drive (to perform the recovery) but isn't
as specific as the website as to which DVD drive to use. As a side
note: the instructions do say that the drive cannot be formatted in
NTFS. I think that I just need to find a way to copy the sys files
onto the hard drive and then copy a generic DVD driver onto the hard
drive so I can access the DVD when it is attached to the Tablet PC. I
would greatly appreciate any experience or suggestions as to how I
might get this to work without having to buy one of these specific
DVD drives that the Toshiba Site suggests. Thanks

It'd likely be easier to pull the hard drive out and put that into
a desktop system using an adapter or put the drive into a
USB external housing and recover the data from it that way.

 

[kegandrew via HWKB.com]

Thank you for your response. Maybe I should clarify a little. I have pulled
the hard drive out of the tablet and hooked it up to a desktop using an
adapter. I can format the drive and copy files to it using this method.
However, I am unable to run the Recovery disk on this machine. When I try
running the recovery disk, it gives me an error message, stating that the
disk can only be run on my specific model Tablet PC. To clarify even further,
the Recovery DVD is a system restore disk that reinstalls Windows Tablet PC
and the applications that are specifically designed for this Tablet PC, and
provide specific functionality that are only available on the Tablet PC.

 

[kegandrew via HWKB.com]

I thought I should add; I have hooked the tablet hard drive up to the desktop
as a primary hard drive and tried formatting it, copied the sys files over
and windows 98 startup files to the drive. Then I put the hard drive back
into the tablet, hooked up the external DVD drive and powered on the laptop.
It errors out stating that it cannot connect to the external drive.

 

[Michael Cecil]

I thought I should add; I have hooked the tablet hard drive up to the desktop
as a primary hard drive and tried formatting it, copied the sys files over
and windows 98 startup files to the drive. Then I put the hard drive back

So you're trying to get W98 onto the drive or was the recovery disc
supposed to install XP or W2K?

Do you have an XP disc? Or does the recovery DVD have the XP source
folder on there for a non-recovery, regular install?

into the tablet, hooked up the external DVD drive and powered on the laptop.
It errors out stating that it cannot connect to the external drive.

That's because you're trying to boot off the (unsupported model) external
DVD via the BIOS and fiddling with the harddrive makes no difference.

It should be easy enough to get an operating system onto the harddrive.

Put it into your other machine with the adapter as a slave, partition and
format it with FAT32 using fdisk or whatever partitioning program you
like. Copy the install files (either the W98 or i386 folder from the OS
install disc) for the OS you want to install to the drive. Then set it
up as the master (pull or disconnect the other harddrive). Boot with a
W98 DOS disk, run fdisk and make sure the drive is active. Then do sys c:
to get the W98 system files in place. Remove the floppy and make sure the
desktop computer will boot to DOS with that harddrive.

Put the drive back into the laptop and boot it up to DOS, then run the
setup program in the OS files folder to set up the OS properly.

In the end, it might be less of a hassle to go get the correct external
drive, especially if you have to do this often.

 

[Arno Wagner]

I have a Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC. It has no built-in or
external CD- ROM/DVD or Floppy drives. It has bios settings that
will allow it to boot from HDD, FDD, CD-ROM, or LAN. I have the
Toshiba Recovery DVD from the manufacturer. The Toshiba support site
lists the supported external CD/DVD drives that will work with the
recovery disk. I don’t have any of these and I am trying to
use a generic DVD drive with an IDE to USB adapter. I am able to
connect the DVD drive (with this adapter) to a computer running XP
and I am able to access DVD’s on that computer. The recovery
disk has instructions that tell me to use an external DVD drive (to
perform the recovery) but isn’t as specific as the website
as to which DVD drive to use. As a side note: the instructions do
say that the drive cannot be formatted in NTFS. I think that I just
need to find a way to copy the sys files onto the hard drive and
then copy a generic DVD driver onto the hard drive so I can access
the DVD when it is attached to the Tablet PC. I would greatly
appreciate any experience or suggestions as to how I might get this
to work without having to buy one of these specific DVD drives that
the Toshiba Site suggests. Thanks

One thing that worked for me in a similar situation (X31 thinkpad)
is that I installed the drive in a regular PC and did the
installaton there. Hiwever that was only a Linux installation,
Windows has a history of falling over dead on hardware changes.
Might still be wiorth a try. If it does not work, I would
advise you to get one of the recomended external drives.

Arno

 

[Arno Wagner]

Thank you for your response. Maybe I should clarify a little. I have pulled
the hard drive out of the tablet and hooked it up to a desktop using an
adapter. I can format the drive and copy files to it using this method.
However, I am unable to run the Recovery disk on this machine. When I try
running the recovery disk, it gives me an error message, stating that the
disk can only be run on my specific model Tablet PC. To clarify even further,
the Recovery DVD is a system restore disk that reinstalls Windows Tablet PC
and the applications that are specifically designed for this Tablet PC, and
provide specific functionality that are only available on the Tablet PC.

Oops. Stupid, stupid vendor! Or incredibly greedy.

The you most likely have to buy one of the recomended external
drives.

Arno

 

[JohnH]

One thing that worked for me in a similar situation (X31 thinkpad)
is that I installed the drive in a regular PC and did the
installaton there. Hiwever that was only a Linux installation,
Windows has a history of falling over dead on hardware changes.

That's easily fixed with XP by doing a repair install.

Might still be wiorth a try. If it does not work, I would
advise you to get one of the recomended external drives.

Yeah, looks like its either that or give up on using the restore disk,
just do a normal OS install instead. That should allow even a repair
install because that will work fine with external DVDs.

 

[Rod Speed]

Thank you for your response. Maybe I should clarify a little. I have
pulled the hard drive out of the tablet and hooked it up to a desktop
using an adapter. I can format the drive and copy files to it using
this method. However, I am unable to run the Recovery disk on this
machine. When I try running the recovery disk, it gives me an error
message, stating that the disk can only be run on my specific model
Tablet PC. To clarify even further, the Recovery DVD is a system
restore disk that reinstalls Windows Tablet PC and the applications
that are specifically designed for this Tablet PC, and provide
specific functionality that are only available on the Tablet PC.

Yeah, I thought after sending my post that that might be what
you wanted to do rather than to recover files on the drive.

You've basically got two options, either get one of the supported
DVD drives or give up on the recovery DVD and use a normal
OS bootable CD to install the OS you require. That last might be
a bit tricky tho if you cant find all the drivers on the toshiba web site.

Rather an inditement of how Toshiba does things,
not allowing any external USB DVD etc to be used.

 

[kegandrew via HWKB.com]

Thank you for all the feedback so far. I used an adapter to put the laptop
hard drive in a desktop computer. I then tried to use the Toshiba Recover DVD.
I recieved an error message telling me that the machine wasn't a Toshiba
machine and it wouldn't let me go any further. The Recovery DVD contains the
Windows XP Tablet Edition OS, Apps that are specifically designed to work
with my Tablet PC, and any drivers required. Everything I have read,
indicates that there is no way to install the XP Tablet edition without the
manufacturers disk. This seems to be because the Tablet OS and the machine
itself are so tightly integrated. No two tablets are alike.

I am thinking that I need to get the hard drive to be bootable and then place
a DVD driver on that hard drive. Then once I have that done I should be able
to put the drive back into the tablet and hopefully it will access the
recovery DVD where the Tablet OS, apps and drivers are located.

Any other thoughts?

 

[kegandrew via HWKB.com]

So you're trying to get W98 onto the drive or was the recovery disc
supposed to install XP or W2K?

I am trying to get the drive to boot to a C: prompt. Then I want to load DVD
drivers for my external USB DVD drive. Once that's done, I want to use the
recovery DVD to reload Windows XP Tablet Edtion OS, the Toshiba Apps, and any
drivers the machine needs.

Do you have an XP disc? Or does the recovery DVD have the XP source
folder on there for a non-recovery, regular install?

The recovery DVD has Windows XP Tablet Edition on it. Since the Laptop is a
Tablet PC it needs the Tablet Edition OS to function correctly. I do believe
that the DVD has a folder for the regular XP Tablet install.

That's because you're trying to boot off the (unsupported model) external
DVD via the BIOS and fiddling with the harddrive makes no difference.

Is it possible to load a generic DVD driver like the Win98 startup disk used
to do so I can access the generic DVD drive?

It should be easy enough to get an operating system onto the harddrive.

Put it into your other machine with the adapter as a slave, partition and
format it with FAT32 using fdisk or whatever partitioning program you
like. Copy the install files (either the W98 or i386 folder from the OS
install disc) for the OS you want to install to the drive. Then set it
up as the master (pull or disconnect the other harddrive). Boot with a
W98 DOS disk, run fdisk and make sure the drive is active. Then do sys c:
to get the W98 system files in place. Remove the floppy and make sure the
desktop computer will boot to DOS with that harddrive.

Put the drive back into the laptop and boot it up to DOS, then run the
setup program in the OS files folder to set up the OS properly.

In the end, it might be less of a hassle to go get the correct external
drive, especially if you have to do this often.

Thank you for your feedback

 

[kegandrew via HWKB.com]

Thank you for your response. Maybe I should clarify a little. I have
pulled the hard drive out of the tablet and hooked it up to a desktop

[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]

that are specifically designed for this Tablet PC, and provide
specific functionality that are only available on the Tablet PC.

Yeah, I thought after sending my post that that might be what
you wanted to do rather than to recover files on the drive.

You've basically got two options, either get one of the supported
DVD drives or give up on the recovery DVD and use a normal
OS bootable CD to install the OS you require. That last might be
a bit tricky tho if you cant find all the drivers on the toshiba web site.

I have considered the supported DVD drive, but am trying to find a way to
make what I've already got work, before I go and purchase yet another drive.
Once I've got the machine running under WinXP Tablet, I won't need the
Suggested DVD drive any longer as I can use any drive that Windows will
support.

Rather an inditement of how Toshiba does things,
not allowing any external USB DVD etc to be used.

It's not just Toshiba. Microsoft is the maker of the OS. Tohsiba does give
several options for these external drives, so they did include some drivers.
I am just trying not to spend the $100 plus on a new drive that I will only
need once.
Thank you

 

[kegandrew via HWKB.com]

[quoted text clipped - 20 lines]

installaton there. Hiwever that was only a Linux installation,
Windows has a history of falling over dead on hardware changes.

That's easily fixed with XP by doing a repair install.

Might still be wiorth a try. If it does not work, I would
advise you to get one of the recomended external drives.

Yeah, looks like its either that or give up on using the restore disk,
just do a normal OS install instead. That should allow even a repair
install because that will work fine with external DVDs.

I can't do a normal install since it is a Tablet PC. It needs the Tablet
functions to operate propperly.

 

[Eric Gisin]

You certainly do NOT want a C: prompt.

I am trying to get the drive to boot to a C: prompt. Then I want to load DVD
drivers for my external USB DVD drive. Once that's done, I want to use the
recovery DVD to reload Windows XP Tablet Edtion OS, the Toshiba Apps, and any
drivers the machine needs.

 

[Michael Cecil]

Is it possible to load a generic DVD driver like the Win98 startup disk used
to do so I can access the generic DVD drive?

No, when the computer is set to boot from a DVD, it's booting from the
DVD. It's not booting from the harddrive, loading a driver, then booting
from the DVD.

I think you just need to get a supported DVD drive and use that.

 

[Arno Wagner]

I have a Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC. It has no built-in or
external CD- ROM/DVD or Floppy drives. It has bios settings that

[quoted text clipped - 20 lines]

installaton there. Hiwever that was only a Linux installation,
Windows has a history of falling over dead on hardware changes.

That's easily fixed with XP by doing a repair install.

Might still be wiorth a try. If it does not work, I would
advise you to get one of the recomended external drives.

Yeah, looks like its either that or give up on using the restore disk,
just do a normal OS install instead. That should allow even a repair
install because that will work fine with external DVDs.

I can't do a normal install since it is a Tablet PC. It needs the Tablet
functions to operate propperly.

Looks to mee like you were scammed.

Arno

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

No,

Read the question, Cecil. That is not what he asked.

when the computer is set to boot from a DVD, it's booting from the DVD.
It's not booting from the harddrive, loading a driver, then booting from
the DVD.

Actually, some drive overlays do just that to avoid a similar chicken/egg
problem with installing an OS on large harddrives.

He would be looking for some bootloader that can install some bios extension
and then reboot. Doesn't Bart Lagerwey have something like that?

I think you just need to get a supported DVD drive and use that.

Not if it is a question of *booting* a(n application on the) CD vs running an
application *on* the CD, unless that application happens to be bootable only,
but not executable.

 

[kegandrew via HWKB.com]

I have a Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC. It has no built-in or
external CD- ROM/DVD or Floppy drives. It has bios settings that [quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
just do a normal OS install instead. That should allow even a repair
install because that will work fine with external DVDs.

I can't do a normal install since it is a Tablet PC. It needs the Tablet
functions to operate propperly.

Looks to mee like you were scammed.

Arno

Why do you say that I was scammed?

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I have a Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC. It has no built-in or
external CD- ROM/DVD or Floppy drives. It has bios settings that

[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]

just do a normal OS install instead. That should allow even a repair
install because that will work fine with external DVDs.

I can't do a normal install since it is a Tablet PC. It needs the Tablet
functions to operate propperly.

Looks to mee like you were scammed.

Arno

Why do you say that I was scammed?

That's just how the babblebot is programmed.
When out of reasoning it's a conspiracy.

 

[Arno Wagner]

I have a Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC. It has no built-in or
external CD- ROM/DVD or Floppy drives. It has bios settings that

[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]

just do a normal OS install instead. That should allow even a repair
install because that will work fine with external DVDs.

I can't do a normal install since it is a Tablet PC. It needs the Tablet
functions to operate propperly.

Looks to mee like you were scammed.

Arno

Why do you say that I was scammed?

Because you were sold a product that was incomplete in a non-obvious
way. Restoring the OS is a normal operation for a PC. If it cannot be
done with the basic unit and you have to buy expensive additions, I
call that a scam.

Arno