Fresh Windows install on Portege M400

ok... this thread has pretty much answered every question I've had. I'll give it another shot... thanks for all th info.

 

Jesse please keep us update us on your progress. I decided to give this a shot also, I am going to beat the boot up time of the new Fujitsu Tablet . Now my M405 stand at about 2:00 min for a complete boot up. Hopefully I can get the cmponent folder from my friend's Fujitsu tablet, too bad the thing didn't come with a CD either.

 

That's actually one of the things that bugs me the most about the M400 - the boot time. Two minutes is if you don't have any extraneous programs set to start with Windows. I've become pretty used to just setting the M400 to hibernate when I'm not using it so it only takes a few seconds to get going when I turn it back on, but with the great speed difference the M400 has over my old M200, it seems to boot much slower (which I just assume either has to do with the slower hard drive or all of the extra programs/processes set to start with Windows on the M400.)

 

Woohoo after two sleepless nights I finally installed a clean Windows XP TPC Edition on my m400. Here are the exact steps of what I did to slipstream sata driver to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition:

1. Get Windows XP Tablet PC Edition CDs (I have MSDN account so I have access to the iso images, otherwise, use torrent )
2. Extract both disk isos to the same folder. (I used WinRAR to extract)
3. Notice the folder is about 760mb, which you can't fit in a regular 700mb CD. To get the size down, go into CMPNENTS\MEDIACTR\I386 and delete MEDIACTR.CAB. Now create a new text document and rename it to MEDIACTR.CAB. This file isn't needed since we're not going be installing any Media Center functionalities.
3. Google and download nLite.
4. Open nLite, point to the folder you extracted CDs/isos, and choose a. Slipstream Drivers and b. Make bootable ISO
5. Slipstream the sata driver for m400, and make the bootable ISO image.
6. Burn the iso image with your favorite burning software.
7. Boot the CD and start Windows XP TPC installation!

I was having problem before because I didn't extract the 2nd iso and used nLite only on the 1st iso. Then it somehow broke the installation by not asking me for the 2nd CD during installation, so naturally all tablet pc functionalities weren't installed. However, I dont know why Interenet Explorer was also nuked in the process, it is still a mystery...

 

Is there anyway you can give us that ISO? been looking for it, but no luck...... and how can you get an MSDN account? do u have to pay for it?

Also if nothing else, can u clock for us your cold start up time and the # of process running many be the # of services too. And does that include all the hotkeys from toshiba, powersaver, and the hard drive protection.

 

** I forgot to put in a step in my previous post regarding slipstreaming sata into XP. **
If you want to install with the OEM xp cdkey that came with your m400, you need to change the content of a file before you make the bootable ISO. I can't remember how to do it on top of my head since I used my retail key that I got from MSDN. However, I remember someone mentioned how to do this somewhere in other topics. Search around and see if you can find it. Sorry it's very late now and I can't open my eyes to locate the post for you (will do later if I have time).

TabletX: Try http://tr.searching.com/view.php?id=169250&display=detailed. I didn't download from that site but I think it should give you the same iso that I got from MSDN. As for the MSDN account, I study computer science at a university and they gave me various Microsoft products for free. Lucky bastard (me)...

After you reinstalled Windows, your boot time will increase significantly, just as you would if you install a clean copy of XP on a fast machine. The boot time for clean XP is around 40 seconds I believe. I can't remember since I already loaded most of the Toshiba drivers and softwares and brought back all the m400 functionalities. Additionaly, I installed a couple other programs like MS Office, Adobe Suite, Nod32 (antivirus) and etc. Right now my boot time stands at 1min with 58 processes, which is still decent compared to 2min+ at factory default.

 

Jesse we have an M400 which we are doing the same with as the Toshiba image is unusable.

You can hit F6 during tablet/XP install and then use a floppy with the Raid drivers. Go to toshiba's site and you want the old RAID driver one v1.02.0005 r2 258K. Just extract that too a floppy--It works we did it with that one.

 

I changed setupp.ini to a whole bunch of values, not one of which worked for me. The only way I was able to get the installer to accept my key was when I copied the entire I386 directory from the M400 onto the CD and installed using that. I didn't examine the differences between that directory and the one on my XP CD enough to figure out what was different, but it did work. (Apparently it wasn't just setupp.ini controlling the keys, because I had already tried to install with a setupp.ini identical to the one in that directory and it did not work)

 

probably winnt.sif, check it out in your text editor

 

Well I currently am running a nearly successful clean install. Unfortunately I can't get either the fingerprint reader or the bluetooth device working, despite installing both the fingerprint utility and bluetooth stack. In the device manager there are five flagged devices, all of which are labelled "USB Root Hub". Has anyone else doing this had problems with these devices? What did you do?