I had the unfortunate thing happen to my dell tablet computer – a windows “feature update” totally bricked it with a BSOD during install resulting in the tablet stuck on a screen saying windows encountered an unknown problem during installation or something like that. The only thing I could do was click OK which rebooted the tablet resulting in the same screen.
To cut a long story short this tablet originally came with Windows 8.1 and was upgraded to Windows 10 some time back. Now later builds of Windows 10 are not compatible with the Venue 8 pro unless you update the BIOS first. Too bad the windows installer didn’t detect this and went and installed the latest build anyway resulting in a bricked device. The original dell recovery partition was also overwritten when it was upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.
Now as this device only has one USB port which is also used for charging I had to fully charge the device and grab an OTG cable, a USB hub, a keyboard, a mouse plus a USB stick. To get windows to install I had to go into the BIOS by holding down volume down as the tablet starts up then releasing and changing the boot order to boot from USB. Now I had to download an older .iso using rufus which would work on this tablet then image it to a USB thumb drive. However once the setup started I was presented with a screen saying that an additional driver is required and the installer would not see the files on the USB stick despite booting from it. All I could see was the internal eMMC storage.
This turned out to be because I was using a USB3 stick and swapping it out for a USB2 allowed it to see the drive where I could continue with the windows installation. I had to use the keyboard and mouse as the touchscreen would not work until windows was installed and the drivers installed from Dell’s website. The reason why USB 3 didn’t work and USB2 does is because the Windows 10 installer does not see certain USB3 controllers without additional drivers. Really Microsoft? In this day and age. How long has USB 3 been around? They could at least have native support for USB3 in the installer especially for a tablet that is 8 years old.
Why can’t Microsoft write code that can detect such compatibility issues before installing any updates? How was I to know I had to update the BIOS?
Oh yeah the Venue 8 pro only supports 32 bit versions of Windows (some other versions are 64 bit though) and only UEFI boot mode is supported.
Ugh..