So, I've gotten hold of a tablet PC/notebook hybrid off eBay for cheap. It's a Toshiba Portege P3500. This baby is rocking an Intel Pentium 3 M @ 1333MHz, 512MB of SDRAM, a 40GB IDE hard drive, a 12" XGA screen with a Wacom digitiser, etc.

it came with a very worn out copy of XP Home edition on it meaning no tablet features like a proper OSK, no handwriting support and the screen doesn't rotate when I flip it into tablet mode. I have a copy of XP Tablet edition that I have nLited down to ~400MB from 710MB and saved as an ISO and burned to CD.

Unfortunately the laptop doesn't have an inbuilt CD drive and the seller forgot to include it's external drive. The seller is sending it but it'll be a few days. Toshiba have been clever and assholes at the same time by removing all USB booting options from the BIOS so that if XP screws up you have to buy their special PCMCIA CD drive. You can't use a generic USB CD drive or boot from a USB floppy or flash drive. That leaves booting over network.

I'm following THIS TUTORIAL to install XP but I can't get it to work. On the tablet I'm getting an error saying "PXE-E53: No boot filename received"

From my understanding what this tutorial is trying to acheive is booting a basic version of Windows on the target computer (the tablet). All this version of windows allows you to do is run Command Prompt with some basic commands. Once you have this running you mount a network drive containing the installation files for the full version of Windows that you are trying to install. Once it's mounted you can install it as if it was in the CD drive.

If anyone has any experience with network booting please help. I don't really want to wait until monday to play with my new toy (that sounds dodgy).

(15/10/2010 08:53 AM)S7* Wrote:  Have you checked your BIOS version? They might have released a new BIOS with USB-booting.

The latest version for the P3500 is 1.40.

Thanks for the heads up but the current installation of XP has dewcided to take a spoon and die. It's the classic flashing cursor of doom. I'll plug the drive into my desktop and see if I can rebuild the bootloader.

That's not my problem. My problem is I have nothing to boot the computer off of. The laptop doesn't have a CD drive or floppy drive. It doesn't support USB booting. The installation of XP on the hard drive is dead. I need a way of re-installing XP.

The trouble I'm having is getting it to boot off the network. I need help with getting tftpd32 to work.

PXE boot is a boot to network

meaning the hard drive has failed as it cannot be recognised

(15/10/2010 05:14 PM)ProperBritish Wrote:  PXE boot is a boot to network

meaning the hard drive has failed as it cannot be recognised

GARGH! My problem isn't that the hard drive is dead. When I plugged it into my desktop it all worked fine passing all S.M.A.R.T. fitness tests 100%. The hard drive shows up in the tablet's BIOS. The problem is that the installation of XP on it is fucked and needs re-intalling. I can't reinstall from a CD or USB because of BIOS limitations. Because of this I WANT to install over the network. I have SET the BIOS to try and boot from the network because I have no other way of installing XP at this time.

My problem is that I've never used PXE before and I don't know how to use it. This means that when I follow a tutorial that doesn't exactly match my circumstances I don't know how to adapt it to work. I'm simply asking if anyone here has used PXE before to install an OS and can share some insight.

Right worry no longer at my whining as I've worked it out. The PXE server software I was using (tftpd32) doesn't play nice with Windows 7 x64. That the reason it wasn't working. What I've since done is install XP x32 on a VM on my laptop, installed tftpd32 on the XP VM and used that as the server. It's slow but it works. Windows is installing on the tablet as wee speak!

nice

lol i skimmed and must have misunderstood

usually when people talk about PXE booting its because they don't know why its happening

i have PXE booted a few computers in my time

its a right faff