Hi,

My notebook (Toshiba M205 tablet) has the problem described at KB307545 which means it won't boot the installed Windows XP Tablet edition.

This notebook doesn't have a CD / DVD ROM drive (except a USB attached one that it can't boot from) not does it have a floppy disk. However it does have an SD card slot which can be made bootable in the following weird way :

1. Format the SD card in FAT16 format
2. Create a 1.44MB bootable floppy disk image in .VFD file format
3. Copy it to the SD card with a specific name "$TOSFD00.VFD" which is recognised by the M205 BIOS.

When the SD card is selected as the boot device the BIOS interprets the contents of the $TOSFD00.VFD file as being the A: Drive contents and the remainder of the contents of the SD card are shown under the C: drive. I have been able to copy the contents of my BartPE disk to the SD card and when booted I can change to the C: drive on the SD card and see the files contained there like eg i386\EXPLORER.EXE, i386\NTDETECT.COM etc etc.

My problem is that when I try to start any of these programs they say they cannot run under DOS so can anyone please tell me how I can boot a BartPE installation on my C: drive from the DOS prompt on the A: Drive ?

Many thanks,

Boo

You made a bootable DOS floppy, right?

And you managed to copy a BartPE on the SD card with a \I386\ structure, right?

You made some good steps , here are (hopefully ) the missing ones:
1) get grub4dos 0.4.4 from here:
http://nufans.net/grub4dos/
http://nufans.net/grub4dos/grub4dos-0.4.4.zip
2) extract the contents of the .zip in a directory.
3) copy to the $TOSFD00.VFD (I mean inside it) the files grub.exe and the menu.lst
4) edit the menu.lst to have two entries like this:

5) use a hex editor or gsar to change the hardcoded path in the SETUPLDR.BIN on the SD card from \minint to \I386, see here:
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=17504
IMPORTANT:
If the SETUPLDR.BIN comes from (i.e. the Source of the build is) Windows Server 2003, read this:
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=58410

Read the grub4dos guide:
http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/Grub4dos.htm
AT LEAST these parts:
http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/basics.htm
http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/cli.htm

When you boot to DOS from the diskette, type on command line:

[ENTER]

You should be able to see the options in menu.lst, if you are LUCKY one of the two entries you added to it (as above) may make the BartPE build boot.

Otherwise you'll have to do some attempts with command line grub4dos commands, by pressing "c" or choosing command line.

Read also this (not finalized) thread:
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=20314
there may be something useful in it.

Report how it goes or if you have problems or doubts.

jaclaz

How is this SD card slot connected internally?

Does the notebook use the USB bus to connect the SD card slot?

Then you may try PLoP Boot Manager. http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html
Copy the PLoP floppy image to SD card. Boot the SD card ant try to continue to USB.

PLoP maybe boot a addional USB stick too.

Yes and yes.



Thanks for your post, I did what you suggested (including replacing \minint with \I386 but I get the following error when I try to run grub :

"Failure restore ROM INT 0x09 vector. Unsupported DOS, device driver, or TSR."

Any ideas ?

Thanks,

Boo

I don't know what the internals are like. It may be a USB-connected drive but when I tried to use one of the Toshiba utilities on a different USB-connected drive it came up with an error so whatever the hardware it must be fairly specific to Toshiba.



Seems quite complicated and I'm not really sure of the relevance of this SW ?

Thanks for your reply,

Boo

Boot BartPE from a USB stick without BIOS support.

Boot your SD card: loads PLoP
continue to USB stick: loads BartPE
fix your broken machine

I tried this but all I get is :

"Loading EHC1 Driver
Searching on hosts
Host 1"

And then nothing happens. Any ideas ?

Thanks,

Boo

May be, and only may be, it is a better idea not to use DOS to start 'grub.exe' in this special case ...
Have you ever tested a pure GRUB-boot-floppy-image. named as "$TOSFD00.VFD", non-DOS-based, but with same 'menu.lst' as jaclaz said?

MfG, FM_81

Did you shutdown the notebook? Try to reboot and boot PLoP again.
There was a different behaviour at a I815 chipset machine and PCI USB2.0 card.

As for grub4dos:
The old grub_for_dos-0.4.2.zip contains a floppy image fat12grldr.img. Try this.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.p...lease_id=474678
And repalce old grldr, include grldr 0.4.4.

Since "without doing anything" the DOS floppy image maps itself as A: and the SD card as C: makes me suspect that it is not a USB kind of problem.

It is more likely that the whatever means the Toshiba uses to do this mapping of the image to A: (probably some kind of BIOS extension) is "sensed" by grub4dos (or DOS loaded) as a TSR, which grub4dos usually do not like.

Trying a direct boot to grub4dos may help.
As I see it shuld be next attempt.

Another possibility is to try using one of the two available loaders from DOS to XP.
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=3611
http://www.multiboot.ru/files.htm

And yet another possibility is to make the floppy a NTLDR+NTDETECT.COM+BOOT.INI one and add to it a bootsector chainloading the bootsector on the SD card (which needs to be a bootsector invoking SETUPLDR.BIN) i.e. the special bootsector bootpart can make.

boo,
try the grub4dos 0.4.2 floppy approach first, and let us know what happens.

jaclaz