After a meeting yesterday I rebooted my HP Tablet TC1100 to install some updates. This machine has given virtually no trouble in all the time that I’ve used it and its travelled with me much more than any other machine.
I didn’t notice that the machine was constantly rebooting until much later and then began to investigate what was causing it. What I soon realised was that the device was blue screening – showing the blue screen for a second and instantly rebooting. So what to do ?
Well the first thing I was interested in was – is the harddisk intact and do I have some sort of xp boot issue. However with a device like the TC1100 with no floppy and no internal cd / dvd – you need to resort to USB key booting. I’m actually going to cover that in another article since its actually a very useful tool. The tablet runs XP pro – Table Edition.
Suffice to say the boot from a usb key using Slax confirmed for me that the internal 40GB drive was functioning correctly but after rebooting a few times and watching closely I could see that the message “Unmountable boot device” was being displayed – so lets deal with that one first.
Microsoft provide a tool to create a set of 6 floppy disks that will boot the xp setup. Attaching an external usb floppy drive which I got with my new vista 64BIT machine (who says they are old fashioned now Pauline!) and putting the first disk you create in starts the machine.
The program you need is here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=55820edb-5039-4955-bcb7-4fed408ea73f&displaylang=en – and is WinXP_EN_PRO_BF.EXE – for Windows XP professional (make sure you get the correct version for home or pro!).
Once the 6 disks have been inserted – and the welcome screen is presented – Press R for recovery console.
Type chkdsk /r and press return
If it ask for the location of autochk.exe – the correct location of this file is C:WINDOWSsystem32 (if your windows was installed on C:) however you may actually require a copy of this to get past this particular problem (you can copy it from another xp pro installation)