Old Windows "Tablet"

[jacob1618]

Hi. My Dad found an old Windows XP Tablet thing that can switch between "tablet" and computer. It came with the hard drive and dvd drive missing and an OS Restore disc. We have a hard drive but not a dvd drive that is working. We tried putting the OS Restore DVD on a flash drive and making it bootable but I think we must have done something wrong...one way we tried was with WinToFlash but I think this disc is too old for it....I don't know, it just won't work. We have a dvd drive that we can remove from our desktop computer and plug it into other computers with a "bridge" thing that makes it almost like a USB external DVD drive. But taht doesn't work at all. The old tablet won' t recognize the bridge so it can't recognize the dvd drive. Does anyone have any kind of solution other than buying a dvd drive that would work in this old thing? We would really appreciate help. It's just kind of a little project we are doing....

Also, we tried to put Windows 8 CP on it from a bootable USB and booted but it came up with a fish and we waited a few hours but the fish didn't go away. Another thing we did was put ubuntu (or another linux distro) on a live usb and booted to it. Ubuntu took forever to load but when it did it worked...but was really slow.

[Copper Bezel]

What error did WinToFlash give you? If that can be solved, it'll be the simplest method.

The external optical drive was a good idea, but If the bios doesn't support it, there's really no working around that. Double-check the bios settings, though, to see that you do have the optical drive listed first in the boot priority list.

If you decided to go with Ubuntu, it would be much faster installed than running from the flash drive, since it's presumably depending on a USB 1.0 connection, which doesn't have the throughput for the OS to function properly. On an older machine, though, you'd be better off with something lighter (like the "Lubuntu" derivative.)

And of course, the very last option is to take the hard drive out, install XP on it, and put it back in....

[arbyd]

We have a dvd drive that we can remove from our desktop computer and plug it into other computers with a "bridge" thing that makes it almost like a USB external DVD drive. But taht doesn't work at all. The old tablet won' t recognize the bridge so it can't recognize the dvd drive.

Try changing the master, slave and cable select jumpers on the DVD drive. The USB IDE bridge may be picky about the setting.
Good luck.