Some bloggers and netbook enthusiasts have tried installation of Windows 7 on different netbooks such as Acer Aspire One, Dell Mini 9, and Eee PC and Samsing NC10 netbooks. Different methods have been tested and suggested. Some of them work on particular netbooks and some of them are more possible on any netbook. I have checked several websites and blogs and tried to find the answer of any question came to my mind while checking out these methods and surely I will try to add those answers here, maybe those questions happen to you too.
Here, I have collected 6 different methods together to help you to have smooth installation of Windows 7 RC1 on your netbook either running windows XP,
You can download Windows 7 Release Candidate free of charge from here.
Method Round up:
1- Using a USB optical drive. This one is the easiest but expensive one.
2- Using an external hard disk. It is fast. you will just need to copy the Windows 7 ISO on it and do the installation from this hard disk. for this, either you can use one of the methods i have mentioned in the following for flash drive or you can plug the external hard disk to your desktop computer and copy the Windows 7 ISO on it. in this way if your desktop PC runs on windows XP, you will need to enter to Disk Management ( control panel--> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management--> Disk Management) and find the external hard drive in the list on the right and choose Mark Partition as Active. after copying the Win 7 you will just need to plug the external hard disk to your netbook and do the installation.
3- Using a flash drive with capacity of 4GB or bigger. There are different ways to make the flash drive bootable and then mount the Win 7 iso file to it. This part is tedious and some tricky that is why I have tried to put together the different methods here to help you to get the right method for your netbook. After finishing these two steps you will be able to boot from the flash drive by choosing it in the BIOS and start installing as the way you always did when you used the DVD drive.
If your netbook (any netbook) runs on Windows, especially
- plug the flash drive through USB port
- Open a command prompt as administrator and type first diskpart and then list disk to get the number of your flash drive (suppose it’s disk 1)
Tip: most probabely the diskpart will not work properly if you run on windows XP on your netbook so I recommend you to check out the method 3.
- format the drive by typing the following:
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=NTFS
assign
exit
- Now your drive is ready to be bootable. For this you have to use the bootsect utility available in Windows 7 or
Now you need to type the following:
d:
cd d:\boot\bootsect /nt60 G:
- Close the command prompt window now
- Copy the contents of the Windows 7 ISO was mounted before into your USB or flash drive
-Set your BIOS to boot from USB now. This part from netbook to netbook is different.
Method 2: (It can be used for any netbook)
To make bootable your flash drive use “the open-source Live USB Helper utility, then use the free Daemon Tools Lite to "mount" the ISO file to the drive. With that done, you'd boot the netbook with the drive plugged in and select it as your boot device.”
Tip1: Daemon tools Lite won't mount every image type. It supports “those formats in plain old, completely compatible .ISO if you look hard enough. Daemon Tools also supports .b5t, .b6t, and .bwt (BlindWrite), .ccd (CloneCD), .cdi (DiscJuggler), .cue (bin), .mds (Media Descriptor),. nrg (Nero), .pdi (Instant CD/DVD), and .isz (Compressed ISO) images as well as many types of copy-protection.”
Tip2: Live USB Helper “can help you deploy the clonezilla's image file to the flash drive. Furthermore, it can make the flash drive bootable and it's multilanguage support.”
To run this Live USB helper program on MS windows, you need a dll file "vb6stkit.dll". If Live USB helper complains about no vb6stkit.dll was found, you can download it on http://www.dll-files.com/.
You can also check out Clonezilla Live on USB flash drive or USB hard drive
Method 3: (it was used on HP Mini 1000 but comparing it with the first method shoes it must be workable on any netbook)
If the diskpart from method 1 could not work on your netbook this method 3 can be useful for you.
In this method you will need to download and install HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, and Daemon Tools Lite or other similar Virtual CD emulator. You will also need to download and extract MBRWizard.
-By the means of HP USB Storage Format Tool format your USB drive. Select NTFS for File system and check the quick format.
- Mount the Windows 7 Beta ISO with Daemon Tools
- To find out the number that your USB drive gets, you must inter to run and type cmd to open a command prompt as administrator. Naviget to the directory you have extracted the MBRWizard (suppose it is in C:\) . Then type the following command (obviously after C:\):
mbrwiz /list
Now you are able to see your flash drive in the list. I assume that it gets the name of disk 1.
Now, you must type the following command to set your flash drive to active:
mbrwiz /disk=1 /active=1
Now, type Y as the answer of the question has just been asked.
- To set your flash drive to be bootable, type the following:
e:\boot\bootsect /nt60 D:
(E: is the drive letter of the mounted Windows 7 ISO got after running Daemon Tools and D: is the drive letter has been chosen for your USB drive)
- Copy the contents of the Windows 7 ISO (including hidden files) to your
- Set your BIOS to boot from USB now. For HP Mini 1000, you will just need to hit F9 on the boot screen.
Method 4: Installing Windows 7 on a netbook running Ubuntu
Method 5: Installing Windows 7 on Acer Aspire One:
For this you will need to download BootSect, USB_prep8, and PeToUSB. All these three are packed for download here.
If this tutorial was not very clear you can get help from this website too.
Method 6: installation of Windows 7 on an IdeaPad S10:
Youwill need to download and install GParted Live (to partition your hard drive), WinRAR (to extract the Windows 7 ISO), HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (to format your USB drive as NTFS) and MBRwizard (to set your USB drive partition to Active in order to boot from it).
If you like you can see a video of installing Windows 7 using USB drive here.
Additionally, in the following forums you can find a lot of discussion of installing Windows 7 on some netbooks like HP mini-note, Eee PC and so on:
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