Eric Mack, the guy who spent days keeping readers in suspense over opening and configuring his shiny new Toshiba M4 Tablet PC turned on his Tablet PC and discovered the dreaded missing/corrupt OS errors. Uh oh. It gets worse. He needs the master boot disk to repair which Toshiba didn’t provide. He hasn’t had the M4 that long before this crash (May 19 - August 25, wee bit more than 90 days) which makes me suspicious of their drive durability (is that what caused this? Or was it some program Eric installed that knocked it out of whack?). Can’t base any opinion on one bad experience, of course, because I’ve had drives and Windows go bad before. My Sony VAIO has had the drive replaced once in five years, it just seems awful quick for their to be HD problems. Maybe it’s just the OS though and the HD is fine? One would expect for the extra expense of Tablet PCs that the drives are more durable, if that turns out to be the problem … let’s hope for Eric’s sake that it didn’t die after barely 90 days.

Warner seems disgusted by the situation:

I do know this. The practice of not including a boot disk, like filling a recovery disk with CRAPWARE, is wrong and should be stopped. Shame? It is tough to cast shame when the party who should be shamed won’t even deign to acknowledge you are talking to them.

Via Warner’s blog, I also noticed that Adam — a new Tablet user — is also having troubles:

Grrr… so far, not off to a great start. And the paper docs are useless, too. Ridiculously general (don’t use the TPC in the bathtub kinda stuff). Maybe the manual-on-CD will give me a better jumpstart into the world of TPC’ing? I know I really should have thought about this before plunking down more than a grand, but why the heck did I buy a TPC anyway? I’m not an artist, nor do I want to be one. And maybe it’s just a steep learning curve …

Adam does have a few positive things to say about his “TPC’ing” as he calls it. That sounds too much like TP’ing to me, Adam. What, are we rolling up toilet paper around our tablets? A new kind of tablet owner revenge! That’ll show ‘em.

Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining about Motion planning to turn their backs on their M-series customers in 2008. No, screw that, I’ll keep complaining until somebody from Motion shows that they actually care and make some sort of concession on this idiotic legacy date.

I just looked through my stuff and it seems I don’t have a master boot disk for the M1400 either, but then I don’t have a floppy drive either. Do have an external CD. I sure hope I don’t ever need a master boot disk, especially if it’s after 2007 …

• Strange Windows XP Pro bootup issue
• How to check hard disk size in Linux from shell
• Hitachi releases first TB DVD recorder
• Seeing first TB external drive for under $400, how long for inexpensive petabyte drives?
• gada.be given boot by Google
• ‘Master’ & ‘Slave’ computer labels cause controversy