I’ve recently acquired a Netbook (Asus EeePC 1005HA to be precise) and in common with many such devices it came preloaded with XP. Now up until 6 months ago I’d probably have left it at that but having used Windows 7 for those last months I really didn’t want to go back. So I decided to look at installing Windows 7. Now as many people have pointed out, there is no direct upgrade from XP to 7 so the install has to be a “clean” one. The issue with the Netbook of course being that there is no optical drive to install from.
The way around this is to boot from USB and take it from there. Now at this stage I will issue YMMV in extra tall letters because my experience of trying to get USB thumb drives booting is a little random to say the least. There are a whole range of techniques out there and some will work with one brand of USB and not another. The information below I know works with several brands and capacities as I’ve used it to create bootable USBs for a number of projects but if it doesn’t work, try a different USB drive. I’ve found Kingston DataTravelers pretty good, 1Gb for bootable CD type apps and 4Gb for DVD which is what I used for this.
To install Windows 7 you need the following;
- USB drive of at least 4Gb
- DVD or ISO of Windows 7
That’s it. If you’re using an ISO you’ll need some means of mounting it to allow the files to be copied in their entirety, I use PowerISO for this as it’s free for ISO mounting and seems to work pretty reliably, even on Windows 7.
The first stage of the process is to format the USB drive and make it bootable. I’ve tried this a number of ways in the past and the best, most consistent method I’ve found is to use the Windows DISKPART command line tool. I also had to do mine with Windows 7 as XP on the Netbook itself wouldn’t display the disk as a disk, only a partition. No idea why this would be but as I said earlier, this is fraught with randomness.
Warning : You can seriously screw your system if you do this wrong. Take care!
Open a new CMD.EXE session and type DISKPART. This will open another window. First of all enter;
list disk
This will give you a list of disk currently on your system. The primary boot drive will normally be 0 but always check just in case. If, as in my case, the USB drive was 1 then the following steps get the job done.
- select disk 1
- clean
- create partition primary
- select partition 1
- active
- format fs=fat32
- assign
- exit
To take that a step at a time;
- Select the disk you want to work with
- Delete any and all partitions from said disk (I told you this could screw things up!)
- Create a single primary partition on the disk
- Select it
- Mark the partition so that the BIOS/EFI knows that it is a valid system partition
- Format it
- Tell it to select the first available drive letter when accessed under Windows
- Leave DISKPART
You now have a ready to boot USB drive and all that it needs are some files.
If your USB drive is U:\ and your ISO is mounted as I:\ you simply issue;
xcopy i:\*.* /s/e u:\
The /s/e flags simply tell it to copy all subdirectories, even empty ones. This just ensures that you have a direct copy of the DVD on the USB.
Now make sure the USB is plugged into the Netbook and reboot. At the BIOS hit F2 (at least on the ASUS) and within the BIOS select the USB as the first boot device. That should be all. Personally I always delete the hard drive partions and recreate them on a clean OS install but that’s personal preference. Once Windows 7 has been through information capture and has copied files for the installation it will get to a reboot screen. At that point the USB device can be removed and the rest will proceed from the hard drive.
So far the results are pretty good. With only 1Gb of RAM the performance isn’t that great but the 1005HA has a SD slot so I stuck a 4Gb SD card in it and set it as a ReadyBoost cache and this seems to make things a lot snappier. Certainly it’s faster than the original XP installation, or at least it appears to be in general use.
