Installing Windows XP from a USB stick

Recently, I bought Acer Aspire One. It came pre-installed with windows XP but soon enough I installed ubuntu as windows was too slow and was abruptly crashing too. But later I realized that I needed windows too for some important stuff.

Now the problem was that acer aspire one doesn't have a cd drive. So I needed to install windows xp from a USB stick. After searching for a while on internet, I found this useful link. Reproducing from this link, you'll need the following:

1 USB flash drive, 1GB or larger
1 Windows XP installation disc
Assorted files that I’ll describe as we go along.

I had a 1 GB flash drive, ISO image of windows XP ( used daemon tools to mount it on virtual drive). Rest of the instructions:

Preparing the flash drive

First up, we need to prepare the flash drive.

1. Download and unzip this file, which should contain 2 folders: 1 titled Bootsect, and the other USB_prep8.
2. Navigate to the USB_prep8 folder and click on usb_prep8.cmd. This will bring up a Windows console window.
3. Press any key to continue and a PeToUSB window will open.
4. Make sure your flash drive is selected, and click start to format your flash drive.
5. When the format is complete, click OK, but do not close the PeToUSB window or the Windows Console.
6. Open a new console window by typing “cmd” into the run box in the Windows Start Menu.
7. Find your Bootsect folder (if you’re not used to DOS commands, you can type “dir” to list directories and files, type “cd foldername” to navigate to a folder name - called foldername in this example, and if there’s a long folder name you can save time by typing the “cd” and just the first few letters and then hitting the Tab key to fill in the rest of the name).
8. Once you’re in the Bootsect folder, type “bootsect.exe /nt52 g:” if “g” is the letter assigned to your flash drive. If it’s E, then change the letter to e. If it’s Z, make it z. Get it?
9. When this is done, you should see a message letting you know that the bootcode was updated, and you can close this console window (but not the other console window).
10. Close the PeToUSb Window, but make sure not to close the remaining console window yet
11. You should now see a list of 8 options in the console.
12. Select one and find the drive with your Windows installation disc.
13. Select 2 and pick a random drive letter (but not one that’s already on your PC, since this will be a virtual drive used for copying your files).
14. Select 3 and enter the drive letter for your USB flash drive.
15. Select 4 and follow the rest of the on-screen directions and you should be all set.

Installing XP on the Acer Aspire One

1. Insert your USB flash drive in one of the USB ports.
2. Power on your computer and hit F2 to bring up a boot device selection window.
3. Choose your flash drive, or if you’re using a USB optical disc drive, select that instead.
4. Select 2 for a text-based installation.
5. Make sure to delete all of the partitions on the hard drive. While you may have some success creating separate partitions on your hard drive using this method, I did not. If you find yourself with a Hal.dll or bootloader missing error when you’re finished, there’s a good chance it’s because you did not delete all of the partitions.
   
6. Create one large NTFS partition (using the quick option will save you a lot of time)
7. Follow the on-screen directions.
8. At least once during the install process, you will be prompted to reboot your computer. If you try to let it boot from the hard drive, you’ll get an error message. What you need to do is hit F2 again when it reboots and this time select option 1 for a GUI setup.

Since the link mentioned above describes the process for installing windows XP on a HP mini, the process differs slightly for acer aspire one. Once windows has booted after you selected option 1 for a GUI setup, just take out the USB flash drive (for reference this youtube video). Hopefully, windows is installed on your acer machine. Restart and check.

Once this is done, you would need to download and install drivers. For this, you would need another machine with internet as internet will not be working on the acer aspire one.

I’d recommend downloading and installing the following drivers: wireless atheros, lan intel, audio realtek, chipset intel, VGA intel, touchpad synaptics, CCD liteon (for webcam), card reader. All of them can be downloaded from here.

One useful application for controlling the fan speed in windows xp can be found here.

After all this, my ubuntu was gone. Now I need to install ubuntu again. If you plan to have both windows and Linux (ubuntu) on a machine: first always intall windows and then install Linux as Linux installation provides the option of manually partition the hard disk.

In any case, enjoy this cool instrumental version of song of hope.