Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC restore

[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

 

[kegandrew]

After reviewing my first post, and reading other posts for similar issues (although these other posts didn’t provide an answer for me), I thought I might want to 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]

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.

 

[corkskrew]

Had exactly the same problem. One way round it is to have said files acessible on a LAN and boot from LAN - you can change boot priority to LAN first, by accessing the bios at startup. The only external drive you can boot from is Toshiba's own DVD drive at circa £300 ($500)... no other DVD drivers will be loaded at startup, only when Windows boots.