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Friday, November 15, 2013

[Rant] Still could not get rid of the Dell Latitude 10 Tablet (part 2)

DellLatitude10-729-620x349

Read part 1 of the story here first.

Now that I didn't have anything in the primary storage drive, I had to use a bootable Windows 8 USB drive to install Windows. I have access to MSDN so getting hold of a 32bit Windows 8 ISO file was not a problem. I decided to install the Japanese version of Windows 8 even though the tablet originally came with the English version. I wanted to sell the tablet and I didn’t want to see it being devaluated because it had the English OS.

However, I had never attempted to install Windows on the tablet with a bootable USB drive because I was afraid that I would screw up the partition structure. I always mounted the ISO file in Windows and ran the setup from there. You can do that, because of the way Windows is deployed nowadays. From past experience, I knew that the MSDN ISO files did work with the OEM CD key embedded on the tablet’s ACPI strings. There was no need to enter it manually.
 
So this was my first time to do it. But for that to work out, I had to get how of one thing – a power USB hub. That is because I had to connect both the keyboard and the USB flash drive. There is only on USB port on the tablet. The keyboard is required because the touch screen doesn’t function inside Windows setup. You have to install a driver from Intel first.
 
I have a G15 keyboard and it has two USB ports on it. However, for some reason, when I plugged the USB drive into it, the drive didn’t work stably. Maybe the tablet isn’t capable of powering up both the keyboard and the flash drive.
 
Luckily I could borrow one from a friend. If I had to buy it was, that would have sucked. It was a 4 port USB hub. I could connect the keyboard and the flash drive without any issues. The mouse is plugged into a USB port on the keyboard.
 
So I created a USB boot drive using Microsoft's own Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool. After that, I connected the keyboard and rebooted the tablet. I pressed F12 on the keyboard to enter the UEFI. Unfortunately the BIOS didn't recognize the flash drive as a bootable device.
 
When I looked into the cause, I figured out that you had to make a UEFI bootable USB drive. The one made by Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool is only for PCs that use standard BIOS. I had to use this method to make a UEFI bootable USB drive. It was quite easy. When I tried to boot from it, it worked fine and I could install Windows as I would on the desktop PC.
 
When I came to Windows, I installed the Atom driver (which also installs the touch screen driver) and the Wi-Fi driver. After that, it was time for me to try out the two methods I found as to setup a factory recovery.
 

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