XP/Vista install from SD Card???

Hi
I am getting my Acer A150 120GB HDD 1GB RAM as a Christmas present, but I am chomping at the bit to tinker with it.

I have searced through various posts, but I can't see if its possible to do a fresh install from one of the SD slots. I only ask as I have loads of SD cards ranging up to 16GB, so thought maybe I could use one of them istead of a pen drive.... which I don't have

If not I will probably try if from a USB HDD which I have.

Also, is there any difference in battery performance between the Linpus Lite and XP/Vista?

Thanks in advance

 

I could not get it to boot directly off the SD, so I just stuck the SD in a USB adapter and it worked great.

 

Ahh, what a great idea, never thought of that

Did you have to go through the same process as if it was a USB key ie download the programs that make it bootable? If so I will need to search out the links

Thanks

 

Umm.. I've tried all of those on my Aspire One but can't notice any difference.
Holds up about 2 hours (maybe a bit more) if you're just browsing the web with a 3 cell battery.

 

I use the HP USB disc formatting tool, do not use the 'DOS boot disk' option. I just format it FAT32, then load up the ISO in daemon tools, transfer the files to the SD card, then select boot from USB in bios.

Windows 7 installed in about 30 minutes.

 

Thanks for the replies so far

Hmmmm, think I need to do some more reading as its not quite as simple as I first thought.

Is it not a case of copying the XP disc to an SD card, place card in reader, then at bios screen change the boot order to look at USB first? Sorry if I am being a bit dense, but this will be the first time I done a XP install on a device without a CD/DVD drive - I have done countless installs of them

Thanks again.

 

The right questions are being asked here, I have MS Office 2003 legal and would like to install that on the AA1, but need to know the way around the issue of no DVD drive for installing software. - Bunter

 

I read in another post about sharing the CD/DVD drive on a main PC on a network. I have used this process before and it worked well, but that was in a windows environment. Not sure how you browse for other computers on a Linpus Lite OS - mine doesn't arrive until Christmas Day, so I can investigate yet

 

Thanks - thought I could do it by dragging the drive to the Shared Folders but it didn't work, I will try finding a GURU who can tell us how?

 

I think it is possible to use another computer to copy the files from the CD onto a flash drive or an SD card and then run "setup.exe" on your Aspire One. I'd say it works that way, unless you've got Linux.

 

Thanks, tried that but message says missing setup.ini and couldnt find a way around it - MS protect their software from pirating so its not that simple otherwise it would be too easily shared.

 

Linux is what I have... or will have on 25th December

I think I will change over to XP as from what I have read so far, something as simple as upgrading Firefox to the latest version is a bit of a mission, so I think I will stick with the simplicity of Windows, just need to find the easiest way to do it.

I have seen USB CD ROM on ebay for less than £10, so probably will go down that route, unless I can work out how to get my USB HDD bootable and install from that

 

This video helped me install XP on my AAO using a 4GB flash drive. Same procedure for a SD card in a USB adapter. You can't use a SD card in the slot since the AAO won't boot from any of its card readers.


When installing other software, I usually either mount my main PC's DVD drive as a network drive on the AAO, or use Daemon Tools Lite and mount a CD/DVD image which can be stored on my main PC, on a USB drive etc.

 

I installed MS Office (2003) on my XP AAO with HDD, simply by copying the Office CD files completely to a USB stick on another laptop. Then stick the USB stick into the AAO, and navigated to setup.exe, IIRC. Worked like a charm.

 

Many thanks for that, very useful