As a purist that I am, the first thing I wanted to do when I bought my eee-1000H is to re-install the OS. I have planned to run ubuntu linux or FreeBSD, but as I need to use Office at work for a while so I thougnt I’ll get a Wnidows installed first.
The problem is: eee PC doesn’t have a CD drive!
After some research, I came across this article that almost got things working.
So what’s not working?
- After finishing the text portion of the set up, I got the dreaded hal.dll error that many people seemed to have experienced using the method in the article above.
- My 8GB USB flash drive is too large to use PeToUSB’s FAT16x format.
How to solve the hal.dll problem
The USB Windows set up seems to have screwed up somewhere in handling partitions. In particular, if you deleted the original Windows partition, created a new one during the Windows set up, which will for some reason create a Logical partition.
To solve this problem, I used Partition Magic from Hiren’s BootCD (which can be easily made to boot using a 8GB USB drive) to create a Primary partition for Windows first, and then I hid my other partitions – that’s right, set them to hidden. Then I proceeded to Windows XP set up and installed XP onto the Primary partition I prepared. That’s it, then I could follow the instructions in the article to finally booting into a fresh copy of Windows.
How to solve the 8GB limit
I haven’t found an elegant solution yet. PeToUSB only supports formatting using FAT16x which doesn’t support an 8GB partition. I tried using Windows format to use FAT32, skipping the PeToUSB step but the resulting USB drive didn’t seem to be bootable.
I thought about partitioning the 8GB flash drive into smaller partitions, but I didn’t have the time to try it.
In the end I settled with my 1GB flash drive :p
