Toshiba Recovery DVD on similar units??

Hi all,

I have the P100-MA2 which comes with Windows XP Media Centre...
my friend picked up the P100-MA3 which comes with Vista.

NOW, the question.. these machines are practically identical.. i upgraded
my bios to v3.30.. the only differences being that the MA3 comes with
a bigger HDD, other than that, same processor, same chassis, same vid card, same everything.

SOOO.. as an experiment, I tried to 'restore' his vista restore DVD on my unit.. the process successfully copies all the data from the 4 dvds.. BUT
as it is 'processing' the installation.. it stops with an error "unable to load winload.exe" and halts..

I have already ordered my free 'express upgrade' and didnt' think that
the restore CD would work but anyone want to elaborate on why
it shouldn't have worked? a possible workaround?

 

i have used a restore cd for my a100 on another a100 (lower specs, etc) and it worked fine.

i dont know why it might be giving that error ( i believe it is for the actual boot menu).....did u try a fresh install (from bios) or an upgrade (thorugh windows xp)???

 

http://209.167.114.38/support/TechSupport/TSBs/ALL/-TSB001375.htm

it could be that.. i'm still thinking there should be no reason for it to work and will try again tonight.

also: googling the 'winload.exe', seems to be a common vista install problem ..

 

*UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE*

Ok, i tried this again and it worked perfectly!

WHY?

well after researching that error msg about 'winload.exe'.. it was determined that
vista halted because there was a usb device hooked up while it was installing. SO,
in my case, it was my wireless mouse usb dongle. I removed it and voila, VISTA
installed flawlessly via the P100-MA3 recovery DVD set!

The only thing that the vista restore could not instal was the audio driver... after
which I simply visited toshiba.ca and downloaded the vista driver for the P100-MA2
and upon installation, sound worked like a charm.


One thing which is odd... as noted, after my first failed attempt, I did a fresh
install of xp home and merged the 2 HDD partitions together (Toshiba unit comes with
2 partitions: 1 is a 10gig and the other is balance of HDD) to give me a one big
HDD. When I went to perform a VISTA recovery, it failed and gave me an error
msg. SO, i put my XP home cd back in, repartitioned the HDD into 2 halves
(1 x 10gig, 1 x remainder) and via XP Home, formatted both as NTFS.
After that, Vista proceeded to install flawlessly! It runs fantastic on the P100-MA2.

My only real complaint is that it takes FOREVER to install!!!