Just try and reinstall Windows on this

I have had, for some time, an “Irulu W10” tablet. After “refreshing” Windows 10 on it, then reinstalling Firefox, then generating a new profile for Firefox, then reinstalling Firefox, I now want to do a completely fresh reinstall of Windows 10. This is more of a trip than the MSI WindPad I had been using previously.

For unknown reason(s), the rebranding reseller (the machine is actually made by “iClever” I found out, because Irulu forgot to overwrite their OEM name and Windows picked up on it) only licensed the x86 (32 bit) type of Windows 8.1 for it, so when I took advantage of the free upgrade to 10, I got 10 x86.

Background: There is only one USB type A port on the thing, which needs to be the external keyboard because you can’t use the touchscreen in Windows Setup and the attached keyboard doesn’t work either for me. I do, however, have a microSD card and a card reader that plugs into the little USB port on the side.

Now, when trying to reinstall with Microsoft’s media creation tool, I ended up having to use the EFI shell to access the microSD card. After changing the display mode so I could use the entire screen, I switched keyboards because the first one couldn’t type a colon, which makes it hard to change to a different drive.

(Aside here, EFI shell allows multi-character drive identifyers! This means fs3:\boot\boot\ is an allowable path.)

Anyway, I thought I had won but trying to run the *.efi file in the path above returned an error about IA32. I took a little while to figure that one out, but it is this: The EFI shell that I was in was from the existing Windows installation, which was… x86 (IA32). Now I have to redownload Windows 10 1903 for x86 machines. I’ve been doing this for about 6 hours straight now. Maybe I should restart the modem?