The Hancocks
The Hancocks
This
articel describes how to restore an Toshiba Tablet model M200 from a non-boot
CD drive
Written by John Hancock.
Introduction
The Toshiba M200 tablet PC does not have the facility for an inbuilt optical drive. The multi-dock ot docking station do have a space for the slim select drive. Alternatively it is possible to purchase an external USB drive. However all of these options are quite expensive. A standard IDE drive and an external enclosure are quite cheap, and there are a number of cheaper external drives. Many of these options are not bootable so if you wish to restore the system from the recovery CD you have to use another boot device.There is a boot image on the supplied CDs but this will only support known types of CD drive. So the probelm is restoring the PC without a supported optical drive.
The good news is that it can be done. You need a boot floppy drive and internet access.
Summary
1. Create a boot floppy from the image on the recovery CD
2. Download the generic USB CD drivers from the Panasonic web site
3. Edit the boot floppy to load the necessary drivers for the USB CD drive.
4. Boot the M200 using the boot floppy
5. Recover the Ghost image from the CD.Although this appear complicated it is really quite simple as long as you follow the steps below.
Make the boot floppy
There are a number of images on the first recovery CD. The simplest and easiest method of making this CD is as follows. Of course if you already have a boot floppy disk you may proceed to step 2. Steps 1-3 must be done on a computer with CD and floppy drives with internet access.a. Place a floppy disk into the floppy drive and the first recovery CD into the CD drive.
b. Start a command promp and make the CD drive the default drive
c. change into the bin directory
d. Run the command makedisk. Once completed you will be able to boot from this floppy disk.Obtaining the USB Drivers
If your CD drive comes with DOS drivers then obviously you would use them, following the instructions supplied. However, most manufactures do not supply such drivers so you are left to your own resources. The good news is that Panasonic have wiritten generic drivers for USB devices and CD drives in particular. These were written for their own drives but will work for most standard USB drives. It does not work for some drives, you will just have to try and see. I suspect that if your drives works OOB on XP as a removable storage device then it should work with these drivers. There is little documentation supplied with these files but a number of people have worked out many of the options. A quick search in google for usbaspi.sys will result in som excelent resources. A couple of them are Computing.net Forums, and an article on The Enquirer news site.a. Go to the Panasonic download site. This site is in Japanese but fear not, about half way down in a table there appears the text "KXLRW40AN.EXE" which will take you to the download page. At the bottom of this page there appear to be two buttons one blue, and one red (I think - I am a little colour blind). The Blue button will download the self extracting package containing the required drivers.
b. Run the download and it will self extract into the download directory. In the subdirectory "F2H" there are two files; usbaspi.sys which is the USB driver, and USBCD.sys which is the CD driver.This involves copying the drivers to the floppy and editing the startup scripts.
a. Copy the two files usbcd.sys and usbaspi.sys to the bin directory of the boot floppy
b. Edit the file config.sys and add the following lines;
devicehigh=a:\bin\usbaspi.sys /v /w /e
devicehigh=a:\usbcd.sys /d:toscd001
The first line laods the USB port driver and searches for any USB devices. The /v option is verbose - messages are shown. The /w option displays a message to plug in any devices and waits for the enter key. The /e option forces USB 2 support - the M200 has USB 2 ports so this is recomended. The /v and /w option can be omitted if the USB devices are already plugged in and you are confident that it is all working!
You may have to alter the Explorer view options to see theis file. Also watch that your editor, Notapad for instance, does not add .txt to the end of the filename. This may be hidden depending on your Explorer view options.
c. Edit autoexec.bat to look like the following;
path=a:\bin
lh mscdex /d:toscd001 /l:q
The first line sets the correct path for searching for programs to run and the second makes the CD drive drive Q:Booting the PC
Plug the floppy and CD drives in and start the M200 whilst pressing the F12 key. This allows you to select the boot device. Move the cursor under the picture of the floppy disk and press enter.
If all is well the machine will boot and load the USB and CD drivers. without any errors. If there are errors check that you have followed the above instructions.Recovering the Ghost Image
Ghost is a Symantec product that enables you to create a perfect image of a disk drive. For instance we have 60 rack mount PCs at work all of which have an identical configuration. We build one, greate a Ghost image on a CD and then use this image to create an additional 59 PCs which are identical in every respect. Toshiba use the same technique to provide you with a recovery. The Ghost image for your M200 is spread across four CDs and will restore you computer to exactly the same state as when you bought it. Not something you want to do every day, but if like me your HDD fails then it is the only way back, unless you have created your own post configuration ghost. The problem is that Toshiba have password encrypted the Ghost image. The good news is that Toshiba also supply their own customised version of Ghost (tghost.exe) that includes the decryption.a. Make the CD drive your default drive by typing in "Q: [enter]
b. Move into the base directory "cd base"
c. Run the command tghost
d. Load the image file preinst.gho
e. Select all of the default values. This will restore the image to an NTFS partition using all of the available space on your internal HDD. You may change any of the defaults but most of the time you would want the defaults.
f. Restore the image. The interactive GUI is pretty easy to follow. The only trick to know is that the images are in ten files on four CDs so there is a bit of CD swapping to do. After the first file is laoded place the second CD in the drive at the prompt and press [Enter]. You will have to press [Enter] two more times for the second CD before changing to the third CD. Simarly for the forth and fifth CD.Finale
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If all of the above worked you will now have a fully working Tablet PC. You can then begin the joyful task of loading XP SP2, The ink recognition pack, One Note SP1, et al.....