Recovering a Toshiba M200

The Toshiba M200 is a relatively unimpressive tablet PC that I've borrowed for an extended period. The Windows install on it was performing terribly (I also have Linux on it), so I decided to recover it from the recovery DVD.

Two days later...

Here's what didn't work:

1. Booting the DVD from GRUB (it doesn't know how).
   
2. Booting from a Philips SPD3100 external DVD drive.
3. Booting the floppy image from that disk (geteltorito helps here). (hung forever loading the USB driver usb20.dev)
4. Booting from a FreeDOS image. Okay, I admit it's because I gave up trying to find a single-floppy image.

Finally I've found something that seems to be working. Outline:

• Network boot floppy (yes, networking in DOS) from NU2
• created with the help of a Virtual Floppy Driver in Windows
  
• loaded on an SD card in the internal reader (name the floppy image file '$tosfd00.vfd')
• The network card is e100 compatible, so the drivers are included. phew.
  
• Generally just follow the menu prompts in the boot floppy
  
• SMB shared CD
  
• I used Mac OS 10.4: enable Windows Sharing under System Preferences-Sharing
• Get your computer's real SMB/NetBIOS name (it's not the name the control panel tells you, but rather a shortened, munged version of the 'Computer Name' at the top of the window): bring up a terminal, then 'grep netbios /etc/smb.conf' and you'll see it.
• Otherwise, follow the instructions in the second part of this guide (ignore the stuff about the PXE boot server; we got around that by booting off the SD card

The instructions only overwrite your first partition, so your other data isn't destroyed, and neither is your bootloader. Back up anyway. I got around 120 MB/min transfer rate, so it took around 15 minutes to restore.

On first boot, part of Windows XP Setup runs. It asks some simple questions like Administrator password, then reboots. You'll log in as Administrator.

Unplug your network and enable the firewall (Control Panel/Network/Network Connections/Local Area Connection/Properties/Advanced/Internet Connection Firewall). Then plug in and visit Windows Update immediately. My recovery CD was SP1, so it'll need to fetch SP2. You'll probably want to create a normal user account for yourself too, so you're not running as Administrator.

PS - the Toshiba Software Updates thing is useless. Remove it and use Microsoft Update. You can also remove Toshiba Registration, SurfHere, Zinio (delete the folder in C:\) and who knows how many other things you won't ever need.