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whistlin' XP

The Dell mini-10 I got about a year ago came with a ridiculously broken install of Windows XP SP3 on it. By ridiculously broken, I mean it didn't have the Windows Installer component/service/whatever installed—and you can't install Windows Installer without having it already. Great.

Until now, I've completely ignored it, because I have Ubuntu on the thing and couldn't care less about running Windows on it. However, it bothers me that half the hard drive is dedicated to a broken XP install, and I really don't need a 160Gb hard drive fully dedicated to Linux on my netbook, so it's worth having something there on the off-chance I want to dual boot.

No problem, install XP over again. Yeah, except that the thing has no CD-ROM drive, and I seem to remember that it didn't particularly want to boot from a USB CD-ROM last time I tried (though in retrospect I probably could have made this work; the problem was most likely related to the second bullet below). So, it was time to make an XP install USB key.

This thread on GeekPolice details a decent way of doing it, but it leaves a few things out and lacks a couple steps that were specific to my computer. In particular,

• You have to use a USB key that is <=4Gb (possibly <=2Gb), because PeToUSB will fail on larger drives. Later versions of PeToUSB, which do work on larger drives, are also not usable because they format NTFS instead, which requires a different bootloader setup than the one this method uses.
• If you are doing this on something like a Mini-10 and using an older Windows XP CD, the setup process will very likely freeze right after loading all the drivers. The solution is to slipstream SP3 into your XP install before creating the USB drive from it.
• By default, the boot.ini created on the USB key assumes that you will install into the first partition on the hard drive. If you're not, you will need to edit the "Boot Into GUI" line in boot.ini so that it points to the proper one (i.e., if you have a BIOS partition first like most factory installs, you'll want to point it to partition 2 instead of partition 1).
• Obviously, afterwards you'll need another flash drive ready so you can go back and reinstall grub in the boot sector.

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