Sharp Actius MM10 Recovery Disk with USB CD-ROM

The default CMOS setup is programmed to ignore the CD-ROM drive, but you can set the system to boot from the USB cd-rom drive:

1. restore factory defaults
2. set CD-ROM first in the boot sequence
3. set USB Boot to "enable"
4. set Plug&Play to "NO" under "advanced"
5. Disable Quick boot
6. Disable Quiet boot (???)

These settings must be correct for the CD-ROM to be used as a boot device, although only a couple are mentioned in the manual or known to any one technician. The big surprise is turning off plug and play, since of course XP Home is a plug and play compatible OS. During the OS restore, the CMOS settings will be automatically modified to reverse all the above settings and disable 802.11b system.

The technicians disagreed about what USB CD-ROM drive would work. One said any would work, another said that there were bootable and non-bootable drives, and any of the bootable kind would work. A third said that only the Liteon CE-CXC02 (which is a CD-RW and DVD-ROM) would work. The later is available from Sharpsystems. Sharp previously made available a less expensive CD-only unit that was not available when I called. I tried numerous other drives, but only the Liteon drive was even recognized by the system firmware. However, once XP loads, all USB drives seem to be quite compatible.

Generally, the restore runs through a few initial screens and hangs with the hourglass on screen. But after a few tries I was able to get to an "Easy Restore" splash screen and then a progress bar. After 20 minutes and one disk change, it declared "Error 49. Write fault" and quit. The system was not operational so I tried again. This time the restore ran to conclusion, and after hitting to turn on the wireless adapter, everything appeared to work. XP SP2 was accepted and did not appear to do any damage.

It is possible that there is a hardware problem relating to the disk drive, however Sharp support says no and refused all my attempts to return the unit for repair. Under that circumstance, I think they have to allow me to think that these are configuration problems related to inadaquate documentation and support. Perhaps this page will help someone else.

Another possibility is that firmware changes in the CD-ROM drive or the MM10, plus the fact that I bought the drive over a year after buying the computer, have left me with a mismatched set. The fact that several users have posted pages claiming to have booted Linux without mentioning the unusual CMOS settings is evidence for this. Nevertheless, Sharp does not accept this possibility.

Many of these units were sold with a coupon good for a free CD-ROM drive, and all the reviews I have seen were tested with that drive. The coupon expired 10 days before we took delivery, so we were SOL. Since any ordinary CD-ROM drive worked after booting, we were not concerned at the time, however it occurs to me now that Sharp may have been offering the free CD-Rom drive as compensation for the lack of compatibility with standard issue drives.

I believe the current model is called the Actius MM20. I don't know if the information above is relevant to the MM20.

A few weeks later the internal hard disk failed completely. Sharp declined to accept it for warranty service on the grounds that one year had passed. They did not recognize the fact that the fault had appeared before the one year anniversery to be relevant. The vendor for the extended warranty accepted the computer for service and returned it quickly, with the same physical drive and the OS reinstalled. The drive worked for several days and failed again. The drive was then RMA'ed to Toshiba which as of three months later has not returned or replaced it.

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg isat nber dotte org
Last modified: March 16, 2005