Portege M200, how to rebuild

Have an M200 that won't boot, at all. Not even in safe mode. XP starts to load and then throws a Stop code with a fatal system error. This machine had been compromised and it's likely the registry is corrupt.

The machine does not have a built-in ROM device. I have the Windows XP Tablet CD. I have an external USB-based CD/DVD drive. I cannot figure out how to boot this thing up so an opsys restore can be done. It doesn't see the USB CD drive as a boot option (most likely because the drivers aren't loaded?). This probably rules using a flash drive then too.

My daughter is in tears and Dad needs to put a stop to that!

Suggestions welcome and appreciated!

 

In the BIOS boot device options does it offer you a choice to boot from a USB device?

 

It does. As does the Boot menu. But it won't detect the drive that's hooked up via USB. It has two USB ports. I've tried them both. I may have to yank the HD, put it in a drive caddy, and toss it in another machine to work on.

 

Do you happen to have an old Windows 98 installation disc? If I remember correctly back then the installation uses DOS and included a manual DOS command to force CD drive recognition. I'm not 100% sure it worked with external drives, as it's been so long, but it's worth a shot.

Installing Windows in a separate machine is an option. You might run into some Windows preloaded driver trouble, but it shouldn't be a major issue.

EDIT: Thinking back on it I don't think the 98 disc will be as helpful as I initially thought, so not worth too much effort, unless you happen to have one lying around.

Is the external CDROM drive a straight-up standard enclosed drive, or is it an internal drive you're using an IDE>>USB adapter with? If the latter make sure the drive is set as 'master'.

 

Booting to the m200 is particularly problematic, and it only boots to a select number of optical drives.

Since you already have an optical drive and it is already proven that it is not one of the bootable ones, you should consider getting an sd card and using the following fix to get it to boot to the Toshiba Recovery disk.

Since the m200 is a tablet pc you'd really find better resources over at TabletPCReview, Gottabemobile or TabletPCBuzz.

 

Thank you for those links. That will be a big help. I picked up a drive caddy and plan to yank the HD, toss it in the caddy, and do the repair (or install) from my desktop.

 

@ kboyer You can't do that w/ the Toshiba Recovery Disk, it will only work in an m200.

You might have to consider doing the XP Installation from DOS, you will need a dos boot disk, and the drive has to be formatted in FAT.

Instructions:
Ok Things you are going to need to do:

Format the drive in FAT, make a partition of about 900MB and copy the XP Tablet Installation Files to it, make sure to copy everything from both disks, for the second disk, just copy the CMPNENTS folder. (Do this from your secondary computer & then put it back into the m200)

You are going to need to make a dos boot disk, use a win98 boot disk ( www.bootdisk.com) but the individual files have to be compressed to the $tosfd00.vfd file to be used on the sd card.

Use winrar to extract the win98 boot files and then you're going to need a program like winimage to make a .img file w/ the contents of the boot disk, and then rename it to $tosfd00.vfd

When you boot to the sd card, and start into dos, @ the prompt type smartdrv.exe
Then browse to the partition where you have copied the XP files and type
D:\i386\winnt.exe where D:\ is the partition with the setup files.

Setup should continue though and you should have you installation.

 

An Alternate method w/ the sd card is also found here on tabletpcbuzz which does the entire process from an sd card.

 

I struggled with the SC card boot process for three hours last night and it just would not boot from that slot. The light flashes but that is all.

So here I am:

I was able to get the hard drive mounted in a caddy and get a backup of all of my daughter's data. Good start but I'm struggling from there. fixmbr and fixboot didn't work and I have no backup of the registry. I'm resigned to doing a clean XP Tablet installation.

I have the XP Tablet install CD. My assumption on how to proceed - format the laptop drive while it's in the caddy, make it bootable, copy over the i386 folder, ntdetect.exe, boot.ini, and NTLDR. The drive caddy is attached to a Vista machine at the moment, but I have an XP machine I can do this with too. My format options for this drive seem to be limited to NTFS and exFAT for some reason and the option 'Create an MS-DOS startup disk' is greyed out.

I'm not really sure how to go about this, having never tried to 'prep' a drive for XP install while it's hooked up to another machine.

Any help/advice is appreciated!

Ken

 

Try using disk management, under computer management-> storage (from control panel) to see if you can format the disk. It has to be formatted as fat16 though. You're not trying to make the actual hard drive bootable, you're going to create a partition on the drive and copy the i386 folder to it.

If that doesn't work use the Windows XP Machine, or you might need a program like Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Director.

i've created an image of the boot disks here unfortunately i no longer have my m200 to test it in.

The sd card also needs to be formatted w/ fat and copy that file to the sd card. then try to see if you can boot to it. It should bring you to a dos prompt.

 

Thanks, I'll give that a try. The only format options available for formatting the SC card are NTFS, FAT32, and exFAT.

 

i think the fat32 should be ok.

 

A couple of things


That SD reader will not recognize cards above 1 gig... so that could be the problem.

I have gone the SD route, and it is a serious pain in the butt. I would recommend doing a network boot and mapping another computers DVD drive to load from. It is a good thing to figure out how to do anyway, and MAN does it make re-installing on those things easier. I finally broke down and got a dvdr that is bootable.

Hope that helps.