Installing Windows XP from external CD Drive
 

ANY HELP APPRECIATED!

I recently bought an Aspire A150 netbook with Linpus Linux Lite pre-installed and I have spent hours and hours trying to fathom out how to install Windows XP on it.

Whilst I appreciate many of you are Linux lovers, I am so used to Windows and don't have the time required to learn the commands and ways of Linux to get the most out of my netbook and therefore need to get Windows XP on it ASAP.

So far I have read many articles and threads asking for similar help and here is where I'm at:

Just bought an external CD drive and (despite changing boot order) it won't boot my genuine XP-HOME disc from the drive so I read up a little on partitions etc. I also tried booting an old genuine Windows 98 disc but it too wouldn't boot.

I guess I need to modify the partitions created by Linux and if anyone could offer a simple, 'tried and tested' easy guide to doing this and getting my XP disc to boot I would be hugely grateful! I'm fairly computer literate but not so clever on Linux :newbie:

Anyone who can help I THANK YOU in advance!!!

If you can't boot from the external CD, nothing else is going to matter until you get that sorted out. That is probably a BIOS issue, not an OS issue. I'd spend some time on-line trying to determine if you can boot from the CD. You may need a different CD drive.

You could try creating a Linux Live CD and see if that boots. That would prove me wrong, I guess.

Welcome to LINUX Questions! As pentode said, this might be a BIOS issue/configuration. Try accessing the BIOS and disable all devices from booting but USB drive then reboot and see what happens. Good Luck! You should try Ubuntu 9.04 before installing XP on your machine. It's very easy to use and it can be installed from a USB stick drive. (pen drive) good luck!

Before you proceed, you should make sure that all important data on your laptop is backed-up.

Booting from CD should be possible when set up in the BIOS, at least on any good device (my opinion). On most PC's you get to the BIOS settings by pressing a key like F2 or Ins somewhere at startup before any OS loads. If your laptop really doesn't boot from CD and you want to use Windows on it really badly, you might want to try a VM using which is more complex...

Partitioning isn't a bad idea. It will make your laptop able to "dual-boot" (i.e. have both Linux and Windows installed and be able to choose one of them at start-up). If you know how to install software on "Linpus Linux", please install a tool named "gparted", if Linpus doesn't supply it it's available from here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php. It's a good program for partitioning (not a commandline one, it's rather intuitive).
In case you choose to partition your HDD, I suggest you make the Linux partition small and the Windows partition big because Windows doesn't do Linux partitions.

Hi;

I think even if you can figure out a way to boot with the External CD drive/disk you still need to have a partition for your XP OS.
(because I tried to install XP on this Linux machine (for my Boss) the other day and I kept getting the Blue Screen of death from XP at the very beginning of the setup,) I Hope that is not the case for you.
any way
Have you run fdisk in Linux to see if there are any partitions available?
You know you can create a DOS/FAT, FAT32 and NTFS etc (any partition in the world) under the Linux OS.
Run fdisk -l (L) to see what partition config you already have.
may be you can post the result here...

Anyway I am not an expert but I am sure there are ppl here who can help you.
Good Luck!

In my opinion, fdisk -l is a good command if you want to copy+paste the ouput here so other people can see how a disk is partitioned. But for blsuk, I guess gparted (or another GUI tool) is a good tool because he doesn't like the command line, and with gparted you can even resize partitions and everything looks intuitive and works as one would expect when looking at the GUI. fdisk as a command line program can't be that straight-forward, even though you need it when you don't have a desktop environment on linux.

Once you get the partitions sorted out..

How to install windows XP from a USB key..
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/v...hp?f=38&t=4704

The Windows installation process is nowhere near as user friendly as Linux imho..

You guys are brill, thank you!

Titian makes a good point, I had a fiddle with the fdisk command earlier but couldnt get it to work and I'm struggling to get the hang of the command inputs unless I have them to copy and paste which is what I did previous to install new programs and make changes to the system so anyone who has the time to offer all that detail please do!!

When I input fdisk I get the following:

Usage: fdisk [-l] [-b SSZ] [-u] device

E.g.: fdisk /dev/hda (for the first IDE disk)
or: fdisk /dev/sdc (for the third SCSI disk)
or: fdisk /dev/hda (for the first PS/2 ESDI drive)
or: fdisk /dev/rd/c0d0 or: fdisk /dev/ida/c0d0 (for RAID devices)

When I input fdisk /dev/hda as the root user it returns with 'unable to open /dev/hda'

It's all very complex isn't it but I love a challenge and I am determined to get it sorted!!

I'll fiddle some more with it tonight and report back if I have any luck!

Thanks again ;)

I have now installed GPARTED but the /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 are both locked and I'm not sure what to do now????

Can anyone please talk me through what to do next?!

UH-OH, think I have wiped the partitions completely and now I'm getting 'error 22', have tried the Win98 and XP discs again but still not booting from the external cd drive! :(

I am not an expert in Linux but I have seen that error. it does not necessarily mean that you wipe out the hard drive but it may be the Grub menu.

At the start up before you get the error hit the Esc key then hit e to edit the line, change the place where it says (hd0,1) to hd0,0 or vice versa. then hit Esc then b to boot.
You can always use the e key and b to change the value and boot again.
take your time and be patient. I have seen this (grub) menu change itself before while I never touched it?!
Also unless you use w in fdisk to write to the disk and exit it will not change anything.

good luck.

Man, I forgot that you can't change a partition table (e.g. when you resize a partition) of a disk that is in use. I have even had problems because of automounting in gnome when I formatted SD cards...

It seems you have to deal with the problem of getting media (USB,CD/DVD) to boot first. Then you can boot Linux from e.g. a USB stick (leaving the disk in your laptop untouched and making it possible to partition it properly). Did you manage to set up your bios on your laptop to boot from anything else than its hard drive?

To install Linux on a USB medium, I recommend you another GUI tool: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ (UNetbootin). As you should see on the website, the program can be used on both Windows and Linux. If you have a lot of free space on a medium - and time/bandwidth for downloading - plug it into your PC (or where you use unetbootin from), start unetbootin and choose a 'distribution' like Ubuntu (800MB) [9.04_Live as version] or Dreamlinux (1000MB). Both distributions should come with gparted.
Again, make sure any important data on the medium is saved somewhere else (even though unetbootin shouldn't touch any).

If I am giving too much information at once, please tell me so; guiding you piece by piece will take longer, though.

P.S.
I don't know if (what) there are small distributions that include a desktop and gparted. If you are interested in one, you might consider opening another thread in this forum for that question (it should be easily answered by someone).

I used gparted from the Live System Rescue CD to resize the partitions on my AAO prior to installing another OS on it for multi-boot..


Theres also the Gparted Live CD/USB/PXE option..
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Are you wanting to dual-boot Windows and Linux, or just blow away Linux and install Windows? I'm not clear on that. If you just want to install Windows without Linux, I don't think the existing partitions are going to make any difference because you're going to just re-format the entire drive anyway. If you want to dual-boot or there is data on the drive you want to save, that's a different story.