Some days ago I got a Toshiba Portege M200 for a REALLY low price. Only point to fix was the broken harddisc. I couldn’t wait, so I took the 2.5″ harddisc out of my phototank and replaced the original harddisc with it. But hey. That would have been far too easy. The M200 is basically a lightweight TabletPC running WindowsXP Tablet Edition featuring a screen with a full featured graphics tablet. It doesn’t have a built-in optical drive or discdrive. I also found out it doesn’t boot from attached USB optical drives. Damn. I noticed it has a SD card slot, so I tried tp copy files to it, but nothing happened. After going through the administrator’s handbooks of the notebook I found out it does boot from SD card: A image of a 1.44″ floppy disc. The extra space of the SD card is then shown as normal drive. I created a bootdisc with all the necessary things and also the whole recovery stuff of the notebook to the SD and booted it up. I then was able to partition and format the new harddrive with FAT32 and start the setup process of the OS through DOS from the extra drive the SD offered. During the setup process I plugged in the USB optical drive to load the special i386 files WindowsXP Tablet Edition needs to install properly and finally converted the FAT32 partition to NTFS. After this was done it was a simple walk-through to install all the necessary drivers and stuff. The screen is really nice featuring a 1440×1024 resolution and the notebook is really small and tiny compared to my Dell 17″ monster and working on it is smooth and without any flaws. The tablet works great and is perfect for sketching and painting. A true graphics artist’s notebook.
