How to install Windows 7 on a netbook (without dvd player)

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JiggyMF

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I have recently bought quite a nice netbook for on the couch surfing ^^
It's an Asus 1201N with a dual core Atom and the Nvidia Ion. It doesn't have anykind of useable drives to install from (no dvd drive, no floppy drive, nothing since it's a netbook).

All fine nice and dandy, but as always it comes preinstalled with a shitload of crap. I would like to reinstall it with windows 7 x64, but i can't get it done.

I have tried making an external USB Harddrive bootable with the windows 7 setup following some guides so i could install from this, but i can't get it to boot.

Any suggestions? How is this normally done?
 
Sounds like a nice one.

I've installed Win 7 on my Aspire 150 several times while tinkering around to see what can be done. If you have access to another Win 7 (or Vista) machine, you can do it. I've used a procedure like this one (http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-7vista-from-usb-drive-detailed-100-working-guide/) on several occasions.

From Linux, it's pretty much the same thing, the key point being that the file system must be FAT (not NTFS) and USB stick must be made bootable for your system. If those requirements are met, it's basically just a matter of copying all the files from your Win 7 DVD to the memory stick.

From Amiga/AROS, I'm not sure.... I'm still getting up to speed on them and I'm pretty much at the newbie level for a lot of it.

Hope this helps.
 
when i need to restore my Acer Aspire One Netbook i have an external USB DVD drive that i can connect and boot from.
You can usually pick up the external Slimline drive caddy from ebay (Click for Buy It Now) for very cheap and if you have an old laptop optical drive its very easy to install.
 
@ JiggyMF

Does the netbook have PCMCIA? If so, I have a Toshiba laptop external DVD drive that might help you out. I could recycle it to you for the postage costs.
 
@bazzaq

I forgot about MS release of that tool. I've never used it but it probably takes a lot of the pain out of the command-line method that I normally use.
 
That MS tool does not list my usb hard drive for some reason, i tried that but unfortunately :(

I tried the guide brian posted earlier today (the exact same guide actually ^^), i managed to complete all the steps, but i can't get the netbook to boot from the USB drive although USB is set as boot device 1 in the bios.
There is 1 step of the guide i had to do by using the Disk management from windows, since 'list disk' in diskpart also doesn't come up with my USB harddrive. Though the harddrive is fully functional otherwise, visible with a drive letter in windows. I even tried formatting it to fat32 hoping that it would initially show then.

I don't think this netbook has pcmcia :/
 
I recently installed Windows 7 on a notebook using the iodd device I reviewed earlier. It worked great but is more expensive than using a USB DVD drive. :)

Heather
 
I think i have found the problem, although i can hardly believe this works this crap ^^

When you plug in a USB harddrive, it doesn't show up in the boot order as such. It will be listed as harddrive (but not in the boot order). You have to set the usb harddrive as 'first' harddrive (else it is second to the internal harddrive and will not show) to get it to show in the boot order.

Fingers crossed bur looks like it's working.
 
JiggyMF said:
I have recently bought quite a nice netbook for on the couch surfing ^^
Click to expand...

if you give up and want to use a good os, it's easy as peach pie with linux. Just slap a distro to an usbstick and install.

Or take for instance macs, reinstall os x on a mac without a optical drive (like the air) - No problem. just mount the disc in another computer, share it and when booting, select to boot from the share.

:whistle:
 
I have the same exact model Asus 1201N and i used an external usb dvd drive, installed Win 7 X64 and if i recall correctly no wireless driver available for 64bit :thumbsdown:, so i reinstaled x86 Win7.
 
I'm not a linux or mac kinda guy.

Primarily because my work doesn't allow me to use one of both since Microsoft Visual Studio isn't available for them :)
All mac users i know tend to bash everything microsoft, and silently run a virtual windows environment on their mac all day long. sigh ^^

Next to that, there is nothing wrong with windows 7 if you ask me.

---------- Post added at 21:34 ---------- Previous post was at 21:33 ----------
JLPedro said:
I have the same exact model Asus 1201N and i used an external usb dvd drive, installed Win 7 X64 and if i recall correctly no wireless driver available for 64bit :thumbsdown:, so i reinstaled x86 Win7.
Click to expand...

I have found a 64 bit wireless driver, i will let you know if it works :)
 
Well i really don't recall if it was missing driver or driver issues at the time, as the net-book is my wife's, and i never tried again (she really doesn't care if it's 32bit or 64bit... :Doh:).

But it's a really nice net-book :thumbsup:.
 
"I installed WIN98 on my cat, but when I tried to put more memory in its pooper to run WIN XP, it gave me an error. The SIMM chips wouldn't fit in its DIMM hole."
 
JiggyMF said:
All mac users i know tend to bash everything microsoft, and silently run a virtual windows environment on their mac all day long. sigh ^^
Click to expand...

I have virtual windows available on both my macs. Sad fact, but I have to check if whatever I make towards the web look somewhat sane on that god awful browser the majority is stuck with (Probably ok as a user, but to make things work for it. sleesh! at least the next version looks promising.)
 
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