ot: diagnosing hardware problem on a tablet

[matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org]

hi folks,

my dad is visiting and has brought his old toshiba tablet, which I had  
hoped to convert to a drawing & surfing tool for my daughter.   
unfortunately there seem t o be some serious problems with it.  It  
currently has windoze installed (not sure which version, probably  
2000) and POSTs fine, but will not boot up properly.  sometimes I get  
a "disk not ready" error and sometimes it boots into a "windows was  
not closed properly last time do you want to start in safe mode"  
screen, after which it hangs.

\My first thought was that this was a disk failure problem.  since  
there's no cd drive on this machine, I put debian-live on a bootable  
usb key and tried to boot from it, but noticed no change in the  
machine's behaviour.   THe thing goes so amazingly slowly that I'm  
thinking there might be something even more fundamental wrong -- bad  
memory, maybe, or some kind of damage to the mainboard.

anyway, i'm wondering whether anyone knows how to diagnose this kind  
of problem when I can't get any kind of OS to boot.

thanks as always!

matt



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