Installing Windows with a USB

lee20010 · 14 Aug 2011 at 09:24

My mum gave me a netbook she had, the specs aren't amazing but it runs, the reason she gave it to me was the OS seemed corrupt, it never went past the loading screen. And windows recovery never loaded. The netbook doesn't have a disk drive so it made things complicated.

I managed to format the HDD last night and install Linux (as they had a section you can download the OS for a USB) that was mainly to see if the hardware was ok. Trouble is now, I'm stuck with it.

I have windows XP ISO file on my hard drive, but how do I go about making the USB a boot drive to actually load an ISO file?

masterluke · 14 Aug 2011 at 09:28

Most netbooks can run XP fine so if you don't want to use linux then you can put XP on there.

http://liliputing.com/2009/08/easie...dows-on-a-netbook-with-a-usb-flash-drive.html

http://en.kioskea.net/faq/3065-installing-windows-xp-from-a-usb-key

lee20010 · 14 Aug 2011 at 09:31

well it was running Windows Vista Basic, but I'd rather free up some resources and use XP. My usb isn't big enough to load windows 7 basic.

lee20010 · 14 Aug 2011 at 09:58

done everything the link said. When my netbook boots the USB, it says remove all media to continue. Then once I take the usb stick out, goes into Linux :/ I've enabled the usb to boot before the HDD as well

masterluke · 14 Aug 2011 at 10:12

which link did you follow?

I used wintoflash before and it worked well for me

lee20010 · 14 Aug 2011 at 10:18

I went with http://en.kioskea.net/faq/3065-installing-windows-xp-from-a-usb-key

its really annoying, I dont know why it isn't booting :/ it just says when I select the USB to boot from

'remove disks or other media'
press any key to restart

masterluke · 14 Aug 2011 at 10:46

Either the USB hasn't been created properly or you havent set it to boot from USB. Have a shot with wintoflash and double check the boot order in the bios..

lee20010 · 14 Aug 2011 at 10:49

I've checked the BIO and it shows up as a bootable drive (which makes sense as I was able to install Linux on the same USB) I had the USB as FAT32, now trying it as a NTFS

Liquid_Entity · 14 Aug 2011 at 10:50

I use this page for my xp usb installs..

http://reboot.pro/4900/

steven_belfast · 14 Aug 2011 at 11:09

Greetings,

Try this:
Win to Flash

Used this a few times and have had a issue with it.

lee20010 · 14 Aug 2011 at 11:10

Hi Steven. I've been using that aswell, it's got to be something to do with the files I obtained lol

masterluke · 14 Aug 2011 at 16:20

what is wintoflash doing? same problem?

lee20010 · 14 Aug 2011 at 20:01

sadly yes....I dont know what to do, followed the steps till 3am last night, repeated the same again today for 3 hours...

masterluke · 14 Aug 2011 at 20:47

bummer - if you used the same usb stick with the same bios setting that worked to install linux the must be dodgy source files i guess.

Have you tried burning that ISO to disk to see if its working (on another machine).