bamatone.net

Remember I tried to install XP over a USB drive on my netbook when I first got it? I tried for a week straight with no luck. Well, since I was going to wipe it anyway to install Mint 7, I decided to give it another shot.

It took 2 hours and 10 minutes last night to figure it out and finally begin the install process! You're going to laugh out loud when I tell you how I won the battle.

I wanted to do a network install, but I couldn't use RIS (remote installation services) because I didn't have a RIS server. (It requires Win2k or Win03 Server plus RIS configured, which we don't have.) The only other option was to share the i386 folder from the installation cd out normally on my desktop computer running WinXP. Ok, no problem. That was the easy part.

The hard part was booting the netbook in such a way that I had a command prompt AND appropriate network drivers loaded. Obviously, I had had no luck with the USB drive method, or I'd have already installed WinXP itself. So here's where it got interesting. I got my USB 3.5" floppy drive out. I could create a boot disk that Windows/DOS could recognize easily enough, but never one that had a network driver loaded AND that would pull an IP address off the router DHCP. (I even tried assigning one through the router via the netbook MAC address, but that was never the problem. The problem was the network driver in general.) After about an hour and a half of fooling with various boot disk web sites and methods, I finally stumbled upon one that worked.

So I had the eureka moment after that disk booted successfully AND pulled an IP off the router. I was able to map a drive letter to the shared folder with WinXP. I ran the command "winnt.exe" and watched in horror as it said I didn't have any space for setup to put all the temporary files. Then it dawned on me - the entire hard disk was allocated to linux and the WinXP setup couldn't recognize ext3 (or maybe ext4).

Enter 3.5" floppy disk #2. This was a normal Win98SE boot disk with the old, trust fdisk.exe and format.exe. Used fdisk to destroy the "non-dos" partition and create a new one. Used format to format the new C: drive into FAT32. (The Win98SE boot disk would not have known what NTFS was, of course, and WinXP can use FAT32 just as well. I planned to convert later.)

I rerun the winnt setup command from the original floppy boot disk. Success! It has the space to begin! But now it can't find "disk1" file. Hmm. I choose "skip." It can't find the next file... or the next. Wtf. After about 5-10 minutes I finally decide that perhaps the i386 folder should not be in the root dir where the winnt.exe setup file was. I create a new i386 folder and move everything down one subdir, with only winnt.exe remaining in the original share root.

Success! (I won't go into using smartdrv.exe here, which speeds up a network install. But I did get it to work pretty easily.)

So WinXP copies over all of the setup files to the temporary hard disk space and wants to reboot to continue. No problem. I unplug the floppy drive and reboot. Uh oh, WinXP setup can't find where it put the temp files because GRUB still controls the MBR and Mint 6 doesn't exist!

I scratched my head on this for a minute, but found out pretty easily that using the "fdisk /mbr" command from my Win98SE boot floppy rebuilds the MBR. Did that, rebooted, and on we went on the setup!

WinXP did finish installing. (And I successfully converted the partition to NTFS.) But the Dell netbook is so new that Windows doesn't have any of the drivers for it by default. I install drivers for the chipset (one for the usual suspects, a second chipset for the built in card reader), bluetooth, LAN, wireless LAN, video, audio, and touchpad. All of that works great except there is one last "unknown device" in Device Manager and I have absolutely no idea what it is. After that, I download and install the 40 Windows Updates.

So I began at around 6pm and finally finished everything, including drivers and basic programs (like Chrome, Opera, etc.), around 11:15pm.

I'm using a total of about 5.5gb of the total 8gb solid state hard disk, so I don't have space enough to install Mint 7 side by side. (For now, it's on a USB drive.) But really, this was just a proof of concept demo for myself. Now that I know I can do it, I can upgrade the solid state hdd to a bigger one (32gb) and install them both.