[Teclast X98 Air 3G] harpy.eagle:
BIOS issue in Air II

Hello,

I have the Teclast Air II, Android version (HG6M printed on the back) of the tablet and was trying to load Windows 8.1 on it.

In the original android version, the I had already rooted the tablet and also fixed the play store issue. Post that we went on to try loading Win 8.1 by following the procedure of 2 USB drives. We flashed the bios using the scripts using FPT and rebooted as instructed by pushing the power button for 10 seconds. After that, the tablet is now stuck in the boot mode and does not go forward. It flashes the American Megatrends logo for 1 or 2 seconds and straightaway drops me to EFI shell. Here is some more information from various things I tried:

1. At one point, it was showing the Win 8.1 logo along with Teclast logo at the boot time instead of Teclast logo, this does not show now, probably after I changed the BIOS options to default

2. I am able to entire the BIOS (the blue screens) using keyboard DEL/ESC.

3. I have tried booting with various options with following results: (a) In the original tablet (as is on Android), I tried booting using Fedlet live USB and it would boot at least to certain extent filling the water drop logo of fedora almost to the full but then throwing error about not being able to find the drive (it was trying to find the drive by label and could not find the live system drive). In the current state, it does not recognize the Fedlet USB attached to it at all in the bios. (b) I put the dos bootable usb. It is recognized as bootable usb in the "boot" menu of the bios (blue-screen setup), but it does not boot with that drive even after explicitly selecting it and disabling every other boot option from bios. It still drops me to EFI shell after showing the American Megatrends logo. The only progress is that in the EFI shell, the drive is mapped to "fs1", and by using "ls" or "dir" commands, I can see the contents of the drive. However, it simply does not boot. (c) None of the windows 8.1 bootable disks created using the wincert or WINPE method are recognized - neither in the bios, nor in the EFI shell. These drives simply do not get automatically mapped and I'm also not able to see their contents like I'm able to see for the dos bootable USB.

4. To eliminate the possibility of using incompatible/bad USB drives, I have repeated the procedure using Sandisk 8gb, Transcend 16gb and Sony 8gb pen drives. But I'm getting same results every time. For all the bootable drives, I tried booting my laptop using those drives and it booted fine (be it dos or windows bootable USBs), so the USB flash procedure seems to have happened rightly.

5. When I connect it to the computer and boot it, it is able to charge itself using micro-usb

6. For few times after flashing the Win 8.1 bios, before the boot screen it was flashing some message ("Forcing Win 8.1 (BOM)......."). But it was just there for a second or so, so I could not see and note it down. Also, now it does not show that message.

7. In one of the "BIOS" screens, I see the option "Disable ME on reboot" or some message like that which is permanently selected and I'm not able to change that option at all.

8. Any USB drive I connect, it keeps on blinking like forever (I have waited even 30 mins post boot after which the drive LEDs were still blinking) leading me to believe that the tab is trying to read something from the drive. However, even after that the EFI shell did not recognize the drive, neither did it boot from there.

9. In the drives already on the system (i.e. the ones I see in the EFI shell without connecting any external USB drives), "fs0" or "blk0" was mapped by EFI shell automatically. It contained the directories "BOOT" and "Intel" and one of these had the "bootx64.efi". However, upon running this file from EFI shell, I got the message that saying that the file was incompatible with "ia32" version of the EFI shell.

10. Upon boot when it enters in EFI shell, it shows these messages - "EFI Shell version 2.31 [5.8]" on the next line, it shows "Current running mode 1.1.2". After which it shows the device mapping table. After that it gives the message "Press ESC in 5-4-3-2-1 (countdown) seconds to skip startup.nsh, any other key to continue", however even if I press ESC or any other key or do not press any key at all, the result is still the same - going straight to EFI shell

11. I have tried all possible combinations of "Quiet Boot" and "Fast Boot" (with full initial USB support, etc), but to no avail - the result is still the same - drops me to EFI shell.

Can someone help me with how to get out of this? As far as my extremely limited understanding goes, something has gone wrong in flashing the bios (the batch file was echoing everything in chinese and I only went by the instructions in this thread in selecting options 1 or 4, etc and some english text visible like Win 8.1 etc). Intel's tool "fpt" or "fptw/64" have to be run from the host system only, so I have to get the tablet to boot in something somehow (linux, windows, dos), but it simply doesn't and I will not be able write the bios file from any other computer to the tablet.

Can the gurus and experts here tell me how to recover this? I can post additional information here if required, but don't know what it could be (the versions of various s/ws in the bios - like TXE, ME, BIOS itself, FW - I don't know what could be relevant)..

Many thanks in advance...