Reinstalling Windows on the NuVision TM800W610L Tablet
Apr. 24 2018
There is a fatal flaw in how NuVision implements the factory reset feature on their tablets. As I learned far too late, selecting the 'Reset Your PC' option within Windows 10 will start the process of wiping your data and restoring it to factory default. However, what really happens is that Windows deletes itself off the boot drive, tells you the reset failed, and gives you some options to try again (which will fail again) or restart the tablet. Once the tablet turns off, you will not be able to use it anymore. If you boot it back up after a failed reset it will go into a bootloop where it only displays the NuVision splash screen.
There is a way to fix this and reinstall Windows 10 onto the tablet. It involves downloading a recovery image from the NuVision website and accessing the EFI menu from the tablet BIOS. Unfortunately, I don't want to reinstall Windows again so while I will provide the instructions here, they will not be accompanied by images.
You will need:
- An external drive capable of being formatted to FAT16 or FAT32 with at least 7GB free space
- A USB Keyboard
- A USB Hub
- The TM800W610L recovery image and driver package
- Optional: A device with a camera and translation capabilities
The EFI in the NuVisions tablets cannot handle drives partitioned with exFAT or NTFS. As a result you will need a drive formatted to FAT16 or FAT32. The internal SD card will not work. I used a 32GB SD card plugged into my hub with a memory card dongle. The recovery procedure will also not work with bluetooth devices, making a USB keyboard necessary. Unfortunately, you need both plugged in at the same time, necessitating the use of a USB hub, and not just an OTG adapter.
The recovery drive does not need any special treatment other than copying all files from the recovery image to the root of the drive. If you wish you may also copy over the contents of the driver package. Both together come out to slightly less than 7GB.
Recovery Procedure
- Ensure your tablet is fully charged- the recovery procedure takes a significant amount of time. Shut it down, and attach your recovery drive, hub, and keyboard. Depress the power button for about five seconds and begin pressing the Delete key before you release the power button. This should bring you into the BIOS where you can navigate over to the Boot section and move the EFI option to the top. Save and exit. The tablet should now start in the EFI shell- press Escape to stay within the shell so you can begin the recovery process.
- You will be presented with a command line. EFI has many interesting and useful features but what we are concerned with is navigating to our external drive, and finding the .efi file that will allow the tablet to boot into the recovery image. By typing "map -r" the shell will refresh and print a list of attached drives. You should have two: "fs0" and "fs1". Type "fs1:" into the shell to bind it to the external drive. Typing "dir" will print a list of the files and folders in your external drive.
- Navigate to "fs1:\EFI\Boot" via "cd EFI", "cd Boot", and finally execute "bootx64.efi". This is the moment of truth- continuing past this point will load Windows into memory and begin to reinstallation process.
- The tablet will now load the Windows installation files and boot into a blank desktop like environment and auto-run a program. This program is in what I assume is Chinese and I assume it is a TMAX utility to automatically install Windows. It has a timer and looks like any other installation program, with a progress bar and a series of messages. Once it is completed, restart the tablet.
- Once the tablet is restarted it should boot into a fresh installation of Windows 10 and you may now go through the initial set-up. Once Windows is configured you can load and install all the drivers. While the driver package includes a script to automatically install all the drivers, it seems to throw a lot of errors while doing so, so double check in device manager afterwards to ensure everything installs as it should.
Once the above steps are completed, you should now have a factory reset NuVision TM800W610L. Now is the perfect time to implement the tweaks I mentioned here, or to begin reinstalling all its missing Windows Updates.
Links:
NuVision Download Center