Tuesday, September 16, 2008

No DVD-ROM No worries

One of my first concerns with purchasing a netbook was the lack of a DVDROM, but I have come to realise, this is actually a blessing in disguise.

1. Ok so you want to reinstall the os (or install a new OS), how do I do it?

When you book the mini-9 and if you select 0, one of the boot options are USB boot.

USB keys are very cheap nowadays, I picked up a 8gb USB key for $80 which is more than enough room.

2. Ive got my USB key now what?

What you have to do is prepare your USB key so the mini-9 will recognise it and boot whatever is installed on it. To do this you have to follow the following steps:

Hop on a machine that has a dvd drive so you can put in your xp or vista media
type diskpart
type list disk (see if your disk is listed)
select disk 1 (assuming this is your usb key)
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

I assume d: is your xp or vista dvd drive e: is the usb drive

Now xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

When that is done simply reboot your mini-9, select 0 for boot options and select USB, your computer will boot and load from the USB key much faster than a DVDROM

9 comments:

Doctor Ess said...

I can't see my USB drive on the list disk command. It only shows my hard drive. How can I get my USB drive to show up so I can run these commands?

Unknown said...

Apparently, you can only see USB drives as disks in Vista's Diskpart. So the above does not work on XP.

Keith said...

My experience is different to what was expected: I'm using XPSP2 and all went according to the instructions (USB drive shows up in diskpart for me) until I got to the 'format' command. That isn't a valid option in my version of diskpart so I formatted the flash disk via the standard storage mgmt gui. Alas failure at the last hurdle; the mini 9 won't boot from the flash disk for some reason so I'm trying to figure out why that is at the moment :(

Unknown said...

Doctor Ess,

This will help you.

http://www.liliputing.com/2008/04/install-windows-xp-on-mini-note-usb.html

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rax said...

hi,gud information. thanx.usb boot drive

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