At end of my rope with installing XPe on T5700

[clnilsen]

Hi everyone!

I have been following this forum for quite a while and have slowly been gathering pieces to work on this project.

Unfortunately, after about a week I am about ready to hang it up on this.

Here's my challenge -

I have a T5700 with 512mb memory (added before messing with the DOM, confirmed works fine). Initially my plan was that I wanted to replace the DOM with a CF based solution, so I followed those instructions and initially tried to use a 6GB microdrive from Ebay. Unfortunately, I could never get the HP sourced image to load - errored out at 0%.

So, thinking maybe the Microdrive was bad, I went and got a 4GB CF card to use.

Unfortunately, I haven't had much more luck.

Using the original package from HP (s29705) to a USB drive, I could not get the thinclient to load the image from the created usb drive (again, errored at 0%.)

Thinking maybe that image was bad, I then tried to load Stroth's image, and while that got loaded (1.0), I had many issues with it. Particularly, I could never get windows update to run.

Preferring to start with a virgin machine anyway, I then copied the .IMG file from the HP distribution to the usb drive i created with Stroths process, and that finally loaded! Yes!

But...

Now the machine will not authenticate the windows install, and is in a deadly loop, so it ultimately never boots. After it's initial configuration, it gives a windows authentication error of 80070002, which after some googleing indicates that the partition may be too large.

Checking the CF card, it is partitioned to 4Gb for the system drive. And unfortunately I cannot partition a removable drive using my vista machine.

SO, I am looking for ideas. Is there a tool i can use to repartition this drive and get it working? Or, is it possible someone could post a working, generic image of a 4GB CF drive that i could install? Some other idea?

I am about to abandon this project, which is rare for me. I do have quite a bit of system knowledge (was an MCSE back in the NT days) so I do have some understanding of the issues here, but i just can't come up with a solution.

Any help would be appreciated, otherwise I am going to be selling this stuff soon

Thanks!!!!


Chuck

[VaHam]

XPe does not like a boot partition larger than 1GB. I just create two partitions. The first being 1GB and the second being larger. Did you follow my instructions at http://gnbi.com/T5710/ I think they should work for the T5700 with the exception of XPe version difference.

[clnilsen]

XPe does not like a boot partition larger than 1GB. I just create two partitions. The first being 1GB and the second being larger. Did you follow my instructions at http://gnbi.com/T5710/ I think they should work for the T5700 with the exception of XPe version difference.

I figured the partition is the issue. I did follow your instructions, but they assume that the computer will initially boot to windows, which mine will not - it gets in the deadly loop of trying to authenticate, and never gets to a workable screen. I can't even get safe mode to come up.

The instructions you mention actually assume the reverse of my problem"

If you go to the start button and open up my computer you can right click on the C: drive and see it is shown as a removable drive and it’s size is 512 Mb. While you now have a working system your not able to make use of all your new drive space. So we’ll do some partioning in a bit to fix that. First you will want to do a couple of things.

The key point here is your instrtions say the partition is 512MB (too small). My drive is initially partitioned from the virgin HP IMG to 4GB, which is of course too big. Not sure what the problem is here. Does the source image determine how the target is partitioned, or is there some kind of switch in the executable (talking from the source DOK) to tell it to only use the 512MB?

[VaHam]

XPe does not like a boot partition larger than 1GB. I just create two partitions. The first being 1GB and the second being larger. Did you follow my instructions at http://gnbi.com/T5710/ I think they should work for the T5700 with the exception of XPe version difference.

I figured the partition is the issue. I did follow your instructions, but they assume that the computer will initially boot to windows, which mine will not - it gets in the deadly loop of trying to authenticate, and never gets to a workable screen. I can't even get safe mode to come up.

The instructions you mention actually assume the reverse of my problem"

If you go to the start button and open up my computer you can right click on the C: drive and see it is shown as a removable drive and it’s size is 512 Mb. While you now have a working system your not able to make use of all your new drive space. So we’ll do some partioning in a bit to fix that. First you will want to do a couple of things.

The key point here is your instrtions say the partition is 512MB (too small). My drive is initially partitioned from the virgin HP IMG to 4GB, which is of course too big. Not sure what the problem is here. Does the source image determine how the target is partitioned, or is there some kind of switch in the executable (talking from the source DOK) to tell it to only use the 512MB?

Hummm something must be different with the delivered setup of your microdrives (i.e. drive already partitioned before loading XPe). Well the best thing to do at this point will probably be to use Partition Magic or the like to partition the drive and then reinstall XPe into the new 1GB partition.

[clnilsen]

I assume to use partition magic I'd have to have some kind of bootable disk image to get it to partition a removable drive?

I don't believe I could partition a removable (CF) card using partition magic running on a Windows machine?

Also, technical question on the HP image application: Does it create a partition, or does it simple write the image to the first partition on the disk? I guess I'm asking is if I go through the headache of repartitioning this CF Card, will I simply overwrite whatever I do when I run the HP DoK imagewriter?

[VaHam]

I assume to use partition magic I'd have to have some kind of bootable disk image to get it to partition a removable drive?

I don't believe I could partition a removable (CF) card using partition magic running on a Windows machine?

Also, technical question on the HP image application: Does it create a partition, or does it simple write the image to the first partition on the disk? I guess I'm asking is if I go through the headache of repartitioning this CF Card, will I simply overwrite whatever I do when I run the HP DoK imagewriter?

I believe that it creates a partition if none exists otherwise uses the first already defined. If that is not the case you should be able to use Parted Magic to delete all partitions on the drive and start fresh.

Yes you would need either a USB CD drive or a USB thumbnail which is bootable to use Parted Magic Sorry earlier I think I said Partition Magic but the link in my instructions is to Parted Magic which is provided with a linux boot os as a part of it's distribution.

[clnilsen]

Awesome!

I'll give that a try this weekend!