What to do with HP T620 with no boot disk found?

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josh

Active Member
Oct 21, 2013
615
190
43
Hey guys,

I bought a T620 on ebay a couple months back and was under the impression it came with WE8. Left it in storage as I got caught up with other projects and quickly forgot about it.

Today I fire up the machine and am greeted with the PXE boot/no boot disk found boot loop. My initial impression was a corrupted boot disk but I ran the onboard diagnostics and found that the disk has no errors.

Ideally I would like to use the system as a thin client. I only really need RDP functionality but the whole WE8 package would be neater. I've tried looking for some sort of recovery disk of sorts on the internet but there's none to be found.

In my research, I've also discovered that there exists some sort of similar OS in Windows 10 IoT core but I am unable to find a way to install that as well.

I guess my fallback plan would be to install openthinclient over it, or some sort of lightweight linux distro with remmina.

Open to all ideas. Seller is a dead end.

I don't

Thanks!
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
1,302
967
113
46
New York, NY
Hey guys,

I bought a T620 on ebay a couple months back and was under the impression it came with WE8. Left it in storage as I got caught up with other projects and quickly forgot about it.

Today I fire up the machine and am greeted with the PXE boot/no boot disk found boot loop. My initial impression was a corrupted boot disk but I ran the onboard diagnostics and found that the disk has no errors.

Ideally I would like to use the system as a thin client. I only really need RDP functionality but the whole WE8 package would be neater. I've tried looking for some sort of recovery disk of sorts on the internet but there's none to be found.

In my research, I've also discovered that there exists some sort of similar OS in Windows 10 IoT core but I am unable to find a way to install that as well.

I guess my fallback plan would be to install openthinclient over it, or some sort of lightweight linux distro with remmina.

Open to all ideas. Seller is a dead end.

I don't

Thanks!
HP ThinState/ThinRestore - it can pull the initial OS image from HP’s FTP site and restore it using a USB drive.
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
1,302
967
113
46
New York, NY
Doesn't seem to exist an option to download anything
Did you download the correct utility?
It's located at:

The ThinUpdate utility looks like this:

ThinState.png

And under "Download the Thin Client Image to local storage or USB" (first option) you are supposed to see this (it should grab the catalog file from HP's FTP server and then populate the menus in the utility).

ThinState Dragdown.png

There's a few drag-down menus that allow you to choose the thin client family, the OS family and the language/locale needed. Once that's done it'll grab the system image (usually an IBR file).

Once you pull down the IBR file you should be able to use the "restore and update USB drive" option to image out a recovery USB drive, which you can use to boot and recover the thin client's internal storage.

All the images are located here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tcimages/EasyUpdate/Images/

And the HP catalog for the images are here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tcimages/EasyUpdate/Images/hpcatalog.xml

It's only an 820 kb file which can be downloaded. You could look through it (via something like vim) using the ID="t620" search string and see which OS images are compatible with the t620, and then manually download it.
 
Last edited:

josh

Active Member
Oct 21, 2013
615
190
43
Did you download the correct utility?
It's located at:

The ThinUpdate utility looks like this:

View attachment 16221

And under "Download the Thin Client Image to local storage or USB" (first option) you are supposed to see this (it should grab the catalog file from HP's FTP server and then populate the menus in the utility).

View attachment 16223

There's a few drag-down menus that allow you to choose the thin client family, the OS family and the language/locale needed. Once that's done it'll grab the system image (usually an IBR file).

Once you pull down the IBR file you should be able to use the "restore and update USB drive" option to image out a recovery USB drive, which you can use to boot and recover the thin client's internal storage.

All the images are located here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tcimages/EasyUpdate/Images/

And the HP catalog for the images are here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tcimages/EasyUpdate/Images/hpcatalog.xml

It's only an 820 kb file which can be downloaded. You could look through it (via something like vim) using the ID="t620" search string and see which OS images are compatible with the t620, and then manually download it.
Hi.

Thanks for the detailed response. I am able to obtain the software and the image. However, I can't seem to write the image to the USB drive at all. I'm getting "Error: Failed to initialize USB drive layout. Error code:50". Google shows a single result with no working solution (Re: Problem with HP ThinUpdate).

I have tried formatting the drive with disk management as well as the format tool of the ThinUpdate and both do nothing for it.

Edit: I found the option to create ISO from the .ibr file and I managed to use rufus to flash it onto the USB drive. Don't know what went wrong.
 
Last edited:

josh

Active Member
Oct 21, 2013
615
190
43
Did you download the correct utility?
It's located at:

The ThinUpdate utility looks like this:

View attachment 16221

And under "Download the Thin Client Image to local storage or USB" (first option) you are supposed to see this (it should grab the catalog file from HP's FTP server and then populate the menus in the utility).

View attachment 16223

There's a few drag-down menus that allow you to choose the thin client family, the OS family and the language/locale needed. Once that's done it'll grab the system image (usually an IBR file).

Once you pull down the IBR file you should be able to use the "restore and update USB drive" option to image out a recovery USB drive, which you can use to boot and recover the thin client's internal storage.

All the images are located here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tcimages/EasyUpdate/Images/

And the HP catalog for the images are here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tcimages/EasyUpdate/Images/hpcatalog.xml

It's only an 820 kb file which can be downloaded. You could look through it (via something like vim) using the ID="t620" search string and see which OS images are compatible with the t620, and then manually download it.
Successfully flashed WES7 back onto the drive. Thanks for the help! Interestingly it wouldn't accept W10IoT complaining about the license. Where exactly is it stored? The OS drive came wiped and I didn't connect it to the internet.
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
1,302
967
113
46
New York, NY
Successfully flashed WES7 back onto the drive. Thanks for the help! Interestingly it wouldn't accept W10IoT complaining about the license. Where exactly is it stored? The OS drive came wiped and I didn't connect it to the internet.
OS entitlement is tattooed to the UEFI/BIOS.
You could probably get away with the WES7x64 version even if the original entitlement was for WES7 32 bit.
 

josh

Active Member
Oct 21, 2013
615
190
43
OS entitlement is tattooed to the UEFI/BIOS.
You could probably get away with the WES7x64 version even if the original entitlement was for WES7 32 bit.
Is there a difference? Simply using it to RDP into host machines.
Makes me wonder, if some listing is advertised as no drive, does that mean that I can still flash WES onto it after replacing the drive?