I give up. I've been at this for days googling and googling but I can't get the fudgeer to work.

Basically I'm trying to install Windows XP Tablet Edition on a Toshiba P3500 tablet/notebook hybrid. Being spoon this thing doesn't have a CD drive, floppy drive or support for USB booting. I do have a PCMCIA CD drive for it. More on that later.

Our story begins with me feeling very pleased with myself for grabbing this bargain off eBay. It cost a good £1500 when it was new and I got it for £100. Granted it's 7 years old but still, it's a tablet PC with a magnesium body, weighs nothing and even after 7 years has 3 hours battery on a full charge.

Because of the lack of in-built CD drive I can't install XP the normal way. When the seller finally sent me it's PCMCIA CD drive (forgot to put it in the box first time) I jumped for joy, popped the XP cd in and booted it up from the CD. All was going well until part way into the installation process. At some point the computer's BIOS has to hand control of the CD drive over to the installer, at which point Windows does what it does best and bluescreens. This is because the installer has no drivers for this particular model of drive. I've googled for drivers but it seems the only place they can be found is on the original Toshiba recovery CD... which I don't have. I've googled for it too.

Onto the next idea. Take the hard drive out, plug it into my desktop with an adapter copy on the contents of the XP CD and plug the drive back into the tablet. Start the tablet up from a DOS boot CD (BIOS retains control of the CD drive because DOS is so old and has no support for PCMCIA), and run the windows installer from DOS. This went well until it comes to the point where it reboots and runs the GUI portion of the installer. When the computer starts up it just sits there with a blank screen. Nothing. I'm guessing this has something to do with the fact that the installation files and the installed files were in the same place. So back out the drive comes back into the desktop. I set up 2 partitions, 1 for installation files and 1 for XP to actually be installed onto. It did exactly the same thing. Just a big fat blank screen.

So I decided to go back to the dreaded PXE booting. This went surprisingly well. I followed THIS TUTORIAL to get a Live-PXE windows image running on the tablet. From here I mounted a netowrk drive containing the xp installation files and ran the installer. Problem is the Live-PXE image provided in this tutorial is based on Vista (sigh). XP's installer won't run if the version of Windows that it's running from is newer. I tried forcing it to run (running Z:/I386/WINNT32.EXE, "Z" being the mounted network drive) but it got about halfway through before crashing.

Next idea was to try and somehow make or get hold of a Live-PXE image based on XP or something older. Problem is I can't find one and I haven't an idea how to make one. A bit of googling reveals that I need a computer running Windows Server 2003... Which I also don't have.

Please guys. I know I've been going on about this for ages but I really am at ropes end. I'm out of ideas and tempted to relist the thing on eBay. If someone can shed some light on the situation I'd be eternally grateful.

(22/10/2010 03:28 PM)S7* Wrote:  Installing XP, people seem to have used this guide with success - http://winner.windowsdream.com/winner/howto.html

Tried that. Forgot to put in my first post. I'm guessing that it would work if I left it for long enough. It gets to a stage where the ISO builder downloads a load of files and takes it's sweet time about it. I left my laptop running for 2 days straigth downloading files and it only got about a third of the way through. Something to do with my internet connection here in halls means files from certain sites just don't download properly. if I can't think of anything else I'll see if I can run it on a uni computer.

Why not connect it with an adapter to your pc and install it from there? I did it with a laptop that had a broken cd drive, took out the drive and swapped it with another laptop just to install, then swapped back.

(22/10/2010 05:32 PM)Mickey Wrote:  Why not connect it with an adapter to your pc and install it from there? I did it with a laptop that had a broken cd drive, took out the drive and swapped it with another laptop just to install, then swapped back.

Tried that. Hardware is too different between the 2 computers. It hangs halfway through boot up.

I think I'll go into uni tomorrow and run WINNER off the WiFi.

i know i sound like a fanboy, but you could try to run ubuntu on it. after a quick google search, it looks like most tablets are supported out of the box in the new ubuntu (10.10), and since yours is 7 years old, all the hardware should definitely be supported. there may be like one or two issues, but at least youll have something running. what's the worst that could happen?

(22/10/2010 10:56 PM)Tetris999 Wrote:  

(22/10/2010 07:38 PM)trademark91 Wrote:  i know i sound like a fanboy, but you could try to run ubuntu on it. after a quick google search, it looks like most tablets are supported out of the box in the new ubuntu (10.10), and since yours is 7 years old, all the hardware should definitely be supported. there may be like one or two issues, but at least youll have something running. what's the worst that could happen?

ubuntu doesn't work with my gma 500 and it's missing pressure sensitivity, multi-touch, and basically everything cept single finger touching D:<

I've tried ubuntu 10.04 (I already had an ISO) and it recognised the digitiser. It didn't work with pressure srnsitivity, the eraser or the pen button. I might give 10.10 a go though. Thanks.

(23/10/2010 03:31 AM)PSPkiller Wrote:  

(22/10/2010 10:56 PM)Tetris999 Wrote:  

(22/10/2010 07:38 PM)trademark91 Wrote:  i know i sound like a fanboy, but you could try to run ubuntu on it. after a quick google search, it looks like most tablets are supported out of the box in the new ubuntu (10.10), and since yours is 7 years old, all the hardware should definitely be supported. there may be like one or two issues, but at least youll have something running. what's the worst that could happen?

ubuntu doesn't work with my gma 500 and it's missing pressure sensitivity, multi-touch, and basically everything cept single finger touching D:<

I've tried ubuntu 10.04 (I already had an ISO) and it recognised the digitiser. It didn't work with pressure srnsitivity, the eraser or the pen button. I might give 10.10 a go though. Thanks.

i mean, its obviously not the best option, not if xp tablet is a possiblilty. but if you gave me a choice between non-functioning tablet, or semi-functioning tablet, id take the latter any day.