Re-installing Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (910) with a USB drive

Quick n dirty Guide to Re-installing Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (910)

For fun to get blood pressure to suitable level.

1. Go to Dell website and look-up the manual for the netbook. Note they mention re-installing operating system requires a optical drive and installation media. They forgot to add “Sucks to be you if you don’t have it”.
2. Curse Dell for not providing restoration disc or thumb drive and wasting your time.

On a separate Windows machine

1. Download WinToFlash (http://wintoflash.com/download/en/)
2. Prepare a USB thumbdrive (1GB or more) and Windows XP CD-Rom (don’t have it? Borrow a suitable version that matches your netbook’s license)
3. Unzip WinToFlash
4. Run WinToFlash specifying your Windows XP CD Drive and USB Drive and let it transfer. Wizard mode works.

On Netbook

1. Plug USB drive (with XP transferred) to Netbook
2. Boot from USB Drive on Netbook
3. Choose Option 1, run through XP setup process in text gui. Take note which your windows is going on, 1 (dell formatted) or 2 (most probably the case)?
4. When done copying files, boot in Option 2 in graphical gui.
5. When XP is done with setup, you might encounter a hal.dll missing error.
   • Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll
   • Continue to boot from USB but select the debug boot “Debug boot rDisk 1 partition 2″ in boot.ini on USB drive [multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Debug boot rDisk 1 partition 2" /fastdetect]
6. Allow Windows to finish setup
7. Fix c:\boot.ini (hidden file) to set default boot to “multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)”
8. Copy \i386 from USB drive to c:\
9. Start patching and installing Dell drivers from Dell support site
10. Curse Dell again for not providing restoration disc or thumb drive and wasting your time.

Disclaimer:

This is quick guide for me to read if I ever need to do this again (I hope not). Works for me, if it doesn’t work for you. Post questions to WinToFlash forums instead.

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