So this makes me feel like a noob again. It seems like this tablet (rca w101 v2) simply is not able to boot a USB device. There is nowhere in the BIOS to enable legacy USB or similar. The fn f7 (choose boot location menu) doesn't seem to show it.
Is there anything I'm missing? I'm supposed to be able to copy the install files to a FAT32 USB drive and boot that way with UEFI, but for the life of me I can not get this thing to boot a USB drive. And the built in restore methods seem to be hosed by the user.
2 Answers
Currently working on this right now... The problem is due to the use of a 32 bit firmware on an amd64 Atom CPU. This makes compatibility difficult. This was posted 8 months ago so I'm definitely lttp.
So far, I've had success with both installing Windows and booting to a live version of Debian.
Helpful link:
1*Windows I had to abandon due to the system no longer allowing downloading of upgrades to a USB. Windows seems to need at least 60gb+ space to do upgrades which doesn't work on this machine, and Windows 10 seemed to overtax the device.
I switched it to Linux as a travel laptop, and have had this working a few years. The process was to use linuxium's awesome isorespin project to install it. It basically will repackage a 64-bit ISO installer with a 32-bit loader onto a USB, instructions here just substitute the atom CPU and the name of the Ubuntu-based distribution ISO you're using:
Since it's pretty under powered, I went with Lubuntu and it runs acceptably:
- The touchscreen I could not get working at all due to a known firmware issue (). If you're talented with a lot of time to burn you could conceivably write a fix yourself.
- Camera seemed to work but I never called anyone to test it with the mic.
- The wifi appears to share the same USb bus as the USB port, so plugging any peripheral more than a mouse seems to draw too much power and crash the wifi.
- The detachable keyboard works, and since you don't have touch that's what you have to use :-)
- The screen starts portrait which is annoying, so to flip the screens, I put this in to start on boot:
xrandr --output DSI-1 --rotate right
