Installing windows on aspire one shipped with Linux

First of all I have to say how Impressed I am with the Aspire One, It is by a long way, one of the best portable pc's I have ever used. However, as with all things there can be drawbacks, for me this was the fact that I could not find one with windows pre installed.

Because of this, I wanted to let people know how easy it is to install a retail copy of windows XP on the Aspire One. I'm not going to go into graphic detail, that's already in other posts on this forum.

First of all, without a lot of messing about, you can't just use an external cd drive. (unless you have Acer's own install or recovery discs), because windows will not be able to see the drive after it flushes the virtual drive it creates during install, resulting in a critical stop. This leaves 2 options for install

First, the following steps are common to both methods:

You will need a Windows '98 cd, or other DOS bootable cd with FDISK & FORMAT on.
You wil also need a copy of Windows XP with Service pack 2 or 3.

F2 during startup to enter bios and disable D2D option, Save and Exit, machine will reboot.
F12 during startup to enter boot menu, select boot from external cd drive.
from the Windows '98 cd, select the command prompt only option.
Launch FDISK and delete all (linux) partitions on hdd.

Method 1) Easy but time consuming:

Use FDISK to create a partition, and make it active.
Reboot the pc with the '98 disc.
Format the drive, and make it bootable (A:\>format c: /s)
Copy the files of the root directory of the win '98 cd to c:\
Reboot the pc from it's HDD.
Make a directory called winsetup or similar.
Put the XP setup disc in your drive, and XCOPY the contents to the directory you made.
Run XP setup from the HDD.
After install of XP, use disk management tool to repartition HDD & convert to NTFS.

Method 2) Bit more fiddly, but faster:

You will need a 1 or 2 Gb usb memory stick.
Windows XP install disc with service pack 2 or 3.

Follow the instuctions here http://www.liliputing.com/2008/04/install-windows-xp-on-mini-note-usb.html
Plug it in, and install windows.

enjoy.

 

There is one other way, and I had to use it on an old PC that had Ubuntu on it. I used an XP upgrade disk. When it came time for a search for a previous edition of Windows, I slipped in a Windows 98 CD. It accepted that and the upgrade continued and was quite successful without half the fuss. So if you have an upgrade disk for XP and a previous install disk for Windows 98 or above, you can install in a quick and easy fashion.