Dear group:

A recent (rather late) newcomer to the tablet pc world, I managed to
crash my 3505 utterly by installing SP2 from XP. So recovery...

I have the IBM external USB CDROM drive and floppy drive, both luckly
was bootable from my 3505 tablet - unfortunately that's where my luck
ends - recovery CD, once started and asked to perform full recovery,
quit immediately with "Wrong Machine". Hmmm.. I took out the
Mini-PCI card and changed the memory to 512SDRAM (it worked fine when
I tried Windows XP Pro install on it while waiting for my recovery CDs
to arrive). I did flash CMOS to the latest 1.4 (from 1.3)... Could
that be the problem?

So I followed Q:\BIN\Recover.bat and decided to go around and call
Q:\BASE\OS.bat directly to recover the image. It started imaging but
stuck (freeze) around 15-20 percent (still CD1). This is
frustrating.. And there isn't a consumer version of Windows XP tablet
edition like Windows XP Pro.

When I run the install on CD1 to create a boot floppy (which doesn't
work until I put in USB drivers extracted from
"OEM_USB_CDROM_P3500_ENG_XP.exe") it did said clearly this recovery is
for 3500 and 3505 - although I think I remember that CD is dated 2002
- could this be the problem?

I'm so confused and not sure how to proceed - I'm going to try install
normal Windows XP and try run install from there.. maybe it'll work..
I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Any similar experiences and suggestions to share, dear tablet
community? :+

Bill

On 11/27/2004 11:52:13 PM, wrote:
>Dear group:
>
>A recent (rather late) newcomer to the tablet pc world, I managed to
>crash my 3505 utterly by installing SP2 from XP. So recovery...
>
>I have the IBM external USB CDROM drive and floppy drive, both luckly
>was bootable from my 3505 tablet - unfortunately that's where my luck
>ends - recovery CD, once started and asked to perform full recovery,
>quit immediately with "Wrong Machine". Hmmm.. I took out the
>Mini-PCI card and changed the memory to 512SDRAM (it worked fine when
>I tried Windows XP Pro install on it while waiting for my recovery CDs
>to arrive). I did flash CMOS to the latest 1.4 (from 1.3)... Could
>that be the problem?
>
>So I followed Q:\BIN\Recover.bat and decided to go around and call
>Q:\BASE\OS.bat directly to recover the image. It started imaging but
>stuck (freeze) around 15-20 percent (still CD1). This is
>frustrating.. And there isn't a consumer version of Windows XP tablet
>edition like Windows XP Pro.
>
>When I run the install on CD1 to create a boot floppy (which doesn't
>work until I put in USB drivers extracted from
>"OEM_USB_CDROM_P3500_ENG_XP.exe") it did said clearly this recovery is
>for 3500 and 3505 - although I think I remember that CD is dated 2002
>- could this be the problem?
>
>I'm so confused and not sure how to proceed - I'm going to try install
>normal Windows XP and try run install from there.. maybe it'll work..
>I am keeping my fingers crossed.
>
>Any similar experiences and suggestions to share, dear tablet
>community? :+
>
>Bill

Ouch! Is the machine still in warranty? You may need to call Toshiba for
assistance, even if just to help you get past this point.

I've never tried the recovery from the original disk, since I had the MSDN
subscription I just did a clean install of the OS that way.

I wouldn't expect the 1.4 bios version to be a culprit, though.

About the only other thing I could think of is to use a windows OS cd to boot
from (one of the bootable ones) just to get to the point where you can delete
the system partition.

Then try to boot from the recovery CD and see what happens.

Alternatively, considering just how poor the Toshibas are with USB booting
from anything but their drive, it might be worth your while to find someone
with one of the targus drives that they are sold with. You may be hitting an
issue with the fact that the IBM drive you're using isn't supported and it's
having a problem at that point of the install, and a "supported" drive would
sail right past it. Toshiba only supported booting and restoring from their
own drives. We've had a hell of a time trying to find others that would work
properly. Some people reported success with a particular SONY drive, and
someone else talked about a LITE-ON drive, but I've got versions of both, and
could never get it to boot with anything but the Targus drive that I actually
got with my M200.

As far as the mini pci and the memory, was the mini pci you were using a
different one that came with it? Did the original one get put back? I've
never heard that they were searching that deep into the system to verify
which system it is, but I guess with the recovery cd junk it wouldn't
surprise me.

Sorry I don't have any better suggestions... But like you said, the recovery
for them is very limited because of the way they did their poor USB boot
support and the recovery cd rather than an OS install option.


--
John