EEEPc install different OS

[MK-2]

I've just got my EEEPc which has XP home plus loads of bits n pieces installed.
It's the 1000 version with 80GB HDD. I have a spare 160GB HDD here and ideally as I have an XP Pro licence I'd like to install that on to it.
What's the best way to do it without having to buy an external CDROM?

I was thinking copy the XPPro cd contents to removal HDD, boot to dos floppy (i have usb floppy drive) and run the install from the removable HDD.
Are there any easier ways?

If it's mentioned in the manual somewhere how to do this, my apologies as I got the delivery last night and only booted it once to finish the installation then left it charging. So I've not really had a chance to look through everything yet

Thanks

[ian_cox]

You will have a tough time trying to install from an external hard drive. I believe it will throw up errors at you designed to stop copied XP disks from working. I have looked in the past for ways to do this but they seem mostly to be hit and miss.

If you google something like "installing windows xp from usb stick" there are reams of pages giving answers that range from "its not possible" all the way to "just extract these cab files, re-write these lines, and 3 times out of 10 it may work dependant on your hardware"

I have a 800 series and am running gOS on it and have also run several other Linux distros but that was simple due to most versions of Linux being free they don't mind how you install the OS. Microsoft have been trying hard to make it difficult for software pirates, which in turn, makes things difficult for everyone

I wish you luck, and if at some point I find a way to get this to work (I might be giving another go at a nlite install from USB stick for my PC over the weekend) I will post something up here

[kmount]

Easiest thing to do is to install it from USB Stick bootable.

Forget the dos-ness etc.

[MK-2]

Easiest thing to do is to install it from USB Stick bootable.

Forget the dos-ness etc.

i tried making a bartpe bootable usb stick following the pe2usb instructions. the eeepc picks up the drive, tries to boot from it and says missing operating system.
if that had worked i could have tried network install. does anyone have a reliable other way of booting to usb stick, as im assuming network install is the only way it will work?

[kmount]

I'll try and do it this weekend and knock up some destructions.

[Michael]

There are loads of guides

[MK-2]

i managed to get bartpe on a usb stick and boot to it, i then tried mapping a drive to my desktop pc with the cdrom in. i can run winnt32 which runs the GUI setup, but after it finishes the COPYING FILES bit it then drops back to bartpe.
i'll have a read thru the guides too, thanks

[MK-2]

got it in the end.
booted to bartpe using a usb stick which also had the I386 folder copied from my xp cd. in bartpe i done
winnt32 /syspart:c: /tempdrive:c: /makelocalsource
it copied the files needed to c: and then when i rebooted it kicked in with the xp pro installation. very handy indeed.

handy until someone mentioned the way they'd done it with a usb>ide adapter on a normal cdrom, and i realised i had a normal cdrom and one of the adapters sat next to me!!!!!