Monday, July 14, 2008

Installing windows XP from SD card

What you need :

Hardware
1. 8GB SD Card
2. A windows desktop/laptop beside you

Software
1. ORIGINAL Windows XP CD with genuine license [LINK]
2. nLite [LINK]
3. Virtual Floppy Drive [LINK]
4. HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool [LINK]
5. SmartDrv.exe [LINK]
6. Virtual PC [LINK] (optional)

Steps :

1. Floppy Disk with DOS system file
Create a virtual floppy disk with Virtual Floppy Drive then format it with create DOS system file option. You will need it to make your SD card bootable later.

2. Bootable SD Card
Format your SD card with HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and select "Create a DOS startup disk" and point it to the virtual floppy disk that you just created in step 1. Now your SD card is bootable !

3. Windows XP Lite
Shrink your windows installation by using nLite then copy all the installation files into your SD card. Copy SmartDrv.exe into the SD Card. You can use Virtual PC 2007 to verify your windows installation on a powerful machine.

4. Boot from SD Card
Enter your Eee PC Bios setup by pressing F2 and select "Removable Dev" as 1st boot devide under Boot tab. Insert your SD card then save your bios changes and reboot.

5. Start windows XP installation
Once it boot to SD card in DOS. Run "SmartDrv /X" and start the windows installation by executing "winnt" command in I386 folder. Follow the instruction until you come to partition management wizard. Delete ALL the linux partition, including the one stated with "bios" and create a single 4GB partition for your windows XP. Format it with FAT32, because you will need to change the boot.ini later. Follow the windows installation ... This will take you around 30 mins

6. Cannot find system file
Your Eee PC will complain cannot find windows system file once you finish your windows XP installation. Don't panic, this is expected, windows installation are confuse between your SD card with the harddisk. So we need to fix it the human way, manual ;)

7. Changing boot.ini
Boot from SD card again and select the windows XP installation option. Go to recovery mode. Run "attrib -SHR C:\boot.ini" to unhide this system file then copy it to your SD card. Change the boot.ini using another computer and make sure it's "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)".
Update your Eee PC boot.ini and reboot it.

8. Starting Windows XP
So now you got your windows XP up and running on your Eee PC !!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I have tried to setup but cannot find the webcam driver. Luckily, i patched it with service pack 3 and it works like a charm.