Netbooks are getting popular these days. Netbooks are another form of Laptop which were originally designed to Access Internet and other small utility software, which does not require A lot of computing power and RAM. They are very Portable as size of netbooks vary from 5″ to 12″ and they weight about 1-3 Pounds (~1KG).
The basic idea behind developing netbook was carrying a computer which is light in weight and handy to use anywhere you want. They also Consumes less power and most of the netbook gives you a battery backup of > 3-4 hours. Netbooks typically run Windows XP and don’t use Vista as Vista is supposed to have a very memory consuming OS. But with the release of Windows you must be thinking of upgrading your netbook to Windows. But there comes the problem as Netbooks don;t have CD drive (to save space and make them compact) how to install Windows. There are 2 options – 1. You purchase a USB CD drive which can be plugged externally and used with your Netbook, 2. You hire some professional who own the necessary hardware to Upgrade the OS.
But we have a better solution for you. Here we giving you a easy tutorial, using which you can make your Pen Drive bootable and use that Pen Drive to Boot and install Windows…. All you need is a Pen Drive of 4Gb or more capacity and Windows installation files.
Here is the process which you need to follow in order to install Windows from USB —
- You will need DiskPart a free Disk Partition utility from Microsoft. If you running Vista you already have it installed as part of OS. if not you can download it form Microsoft’s Site free of cost ind install.
- If you running Vista Open Command Prompt by selecting Run As administrator, otherwise Simply open Command prompt.
- Launch DiskPart, by typing diskpart on Command Prompt.
- Once you have Disk Part Prompt Type “list disk” without Quotes, and not down the disk number associated with your USB disk. You can find this by Size of each disk as USB will be only disk to have such small size.
- now type ” Select disk x” where x is your disk number for your USB drive you noted in previous step.
- Now type “clean”.
- Once Clean operation finishes type “create partition primary” this will make USB drive partition as primary partition. This is required to boot from any storage device.
- Now type “active”, this will make current partition as active partition on your USB disk.
- Now you need to format the current partition as fat 32 file system for this type “format fs=fat32 quick” and hit enter key.
- Now type “assign” once format is completed, this will assign a drive letter to your USB drive so that you can perform the file operation using Windows Explorer.
- Now If you have Windows installation DVD, simply copy all files and paste it on your USB key. If you have ISO of installation use WinRar to extract files from ISO and extract them to root of your USB drive. The file copy/extraction will take a while. and you are done with preparing your USB drive.
- Simply insert the USB in your Netbook / Machine and boot form it by restarting the machine, this will begin Windows Installation.
You can use this tutorial for other systems as well where you do not want to use your CD ROM or it’s damaged but please check that you can boot from USB drive before starting all these. Most of Netbook’s BIOS already have this feature as that’s only way you can boot a netbook if in case your HDD fails or you need to repair you Netbook OS. Also Installing from a USB key will be faster than installing it from DVD because of Higher read write speed of USB.