I’ve been trying to update my Toshiba M200 tablet this semester. This hasn’t been as easy as it should be. (No Mac jokes please.) The Tosh doesn’t have an internal CD/DVD drive or floppy drive, so my boot options are USB CD/DVD player, SD card, or network.

Apparently, the Tosh BIOS is picky about brands/types of CD/DVD players, as the two players I tried didn’t work for boot. Searching around, this seems to be a known problem but resolved if you have a Toshiba USB reader.

Then we tried the network, and it will PXE/RIS boot okay… but our images don’t have the right network driver for the tablet. And apparently the drivers our Windows people have been able to find don’t load into RIS in a way we can use them easily.

So now I’m down to three options:

1) Use an SD card to somehow load an OS in a way that I can load the network drivers and bootstrap the rest of the install
2) Use a large USB key or USB hard drive to see if that will boot. IIRC, I think we tried this and had problems, that’s why I went with the SD card first.
3) Install Linux.

Thing is, I don’t have an SD card. Could I borrow one from someone to see if that would help us image this? I don’t think it needs to be large – 512M is probably good enough, or maybe smaller. Or, you know, if you have a 2G+ USB key, I could try that too.

The Linux thing was more a joke, because the only tablet piece I really use is OneNote, and I wouldn’t want to permanently do without that. But the XP installation on it right now is so rotten/decrepit that it’s almost unusuable. If Linux were quick and snappy, I could probably get away with running that (yikes, even on a laptop) for my normal tasks than dealing with my lame XP — at least until the reimage is resolved. And with spring break starting after Wednesday for me, I have until the 26th when I’d “need” to use OneNote again.

Reinstalling XP (or Vista) shouldn’t be this difficult!