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Sombre

I need some serious android tablet help!

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Hello friends! This is essentially a repost of a thread I made over on Giantbomb, as I know a lot of people on here share some insight into the inner workings of Linu/Android. Here goes:

 

 

I'll try to break this down into the simplest terms possible, because I'm not entirely sure what happened myself.

Last week, I picked up this tablet from a friend who was selling it for an absolute song. It could dual boot into either a windows 7 partition, or some kind of android OS, I presume some kind of linux based thing.

The devide is unfortunately plagued with some low ass hard drive space issues, so I spent some time trying to get some stuff downloaded so I could...use it properly. As I was cleaning out some hard drive space, I accidentally caused a bit of a fuck up, and I THINK I deleted the android partition. My original intent was to get rid of that, and use it wholly as a windows 7 tablet, but I fucked up, admittedly, and ended up clearing out the partition wrong. My plan was to remove the android part, freeing up that 2gb for use on the windows partition, but I believe I did it wrong.

 

From what I've gathered from very underwhelming google results is delete some kind of GRUB boot order, which is throwing up an "Error 17" anytime the device tries to boot itself from the hard drive, as it can't find out how to boot anymore, or the order I believe?

So, as it stands, it's a bit of a brick, as it stands, which is obviously upsetting. When I turn it on, it tries to boot, and just goes to a black screen that says "Error 17". The device has no CD drive, but more than one USB slot with which to utilise. If anyone could shed light as to what I've done, and offer advice on how to fix it, I would be eternally grateful.

 

I'm honestly at my wits end already. It's such an elusive error message that I feel very lost, already!

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It sounds like you fucked up the bootloader (GRUB). I don't know enough about GRUB to know whether it needed the Android partition to be there to work, or whether there's an easy way to fix it, or anything. If you plan on only using Windows on it, it's a relatively easy fix anyway - just http://www.johnpapa.net/bootfromusb/'>make a bootable Windows USB, plug it in, boot from it (you miiiight need a keyboard to press the appropriate button to choose your boot device) and go through the Windows install process. The Windows installer might also recognise that there's an existing Windows installation without a working bootloader and offer to fix it, which may or may not work. If not, probably just go ahead and reinstall Windows from the USB.

If you have a Windows 8 key I'd suggest installing that, I've found it's faster than 7 on low-spec machines. The procedure for making a bootable USB is exactly the same.

 

In reinstalling Windows you won't be able to use most of your installed programs, but won't actually lose data unless you choose to format. 

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