The Kohjinsha SA100FA was, at one point, one of the most innovative (and reasonably priced) pseudo UMPCs available in Japan. Until the eventual release of the Fujitsu FMV-U8240 and Asus Eee PC, the Kohjinsha was the cat's arse.
One of the keys to keeping the Kohjinsha’s form factor as small as possible was the lack of a built-in CD/DVD ROM drive.
The unit came pre-loaded with windows XP home (Japanese version). Oddly enough, the unboxing revealed no windows installation disk! I suppose the manufacturer assumed that a) there’s no CD ROM drive, so there’s certainly no need to provide a windows install CD (but, even more strange, they provided two MS Office 2003 CDs) and b) their customers have no idea how to use an external USB CD ROM drive.
Sarcasm aside, I loved this version of the Kohjinsha. It remains one of my most favourite gadget purchases, second only to an original Japanese Famicom.
So the day finally arrived where I wanted a clean XP install…but I had no external CD-ROM drive unit. I searched high and low for tutorials on installing [a legitimate] copy of windows from a USB key, but found many either incomplete or the result was junk.
Without further ado, here is how to install XP via USB key. This may also work on other UMPCs that lack a CD-ROM drive, but I cannot 100% confirm this.
You’ll need:
- A copy of Windows XP (in my case, it was the Home Edition)
- A legitimate Windows XP key. (please don’t use keygens or ‘borrowed’ authentication keys! Microsoft is clearly in dire straights these days, with the encroachment of Linux, Mac and an expensive purchase of Yahoo! in the works...MS needs every last cent they can get.)
- 1 USB key (I used a 2GB key, but anything with enough free storage to fit the contents of the XP install CD will suffice).
- A DOS boot disk image (downloadable from HERE – I used the windows 98 boot disk image. I found seeing the old-school Windows 98 logo screen as frightening as it was nostalgic, but you can use any boot disk image.)
- HP USB key formatting tool. (downloadable here HERE )
Step 1: Formatting the USB key.
Insert the USB key into your PC.
Open the HP key formatting program. From the dropdown, select the drive designated for your USB key and click ‘format’.
Step 2: Adding DOS to the bootable USB key.
The USB key should now have an MBR added, thanks to the HP formatting tool. Extract the emergency boot disk image (using WinRAR, for example) to your PC and add the files to your USB key.
Note: Some emergency boot disks do not include SmartDrive (Smrtdrv.exe). I recommend (as will the windows XP installation) that you find a DOS boot disk with this program and have it handy. Smart drive = Windows install make go fast.
Step 3: The XP install CD
Using a legitimate Windows XP install CD, select all the files and folders therein and copy them to the USB key.
Many XP-via-USB key install tutorials call for only grabbing the i386 folder. This will also work, but I found that I was missing a few files found elsewhere (apparently) to install some language options. If you’re short on storage on the USB key, you can only use the i386 folder. But I had no issues when I blindly copied all files on the XP install CD onto the USB key.
Step 4: Modify your BIOS boot order.
Reboot your PC and, when prompted to enter the BIOS (usually an F key—sorry if I’m insulting your intelligence), do so and change the boot order so the USB is set as first. Or, if your BIOS allows for quick boot options, give ‘er.
Step 5: Making the HDD bootable.
“Now, why would you want to do this??” I hear you asking.
The single most troublesome thing with installing XP on a Kohjinsha via USB were the automatic drive designations. The Kohjinsha did not seem to behave predictably when it came to recognizing it’s own internal HDD as a target for an XP install. It seemed no matter what I did—DOS commands (though I’m admittedly not an expert there) or BIOS settings, DOS nor Win XP setup would not recognize the HDD drive as a destination for XP setup files. Likely, there is *some* fix for this that a DOS/Windows expert could devise (comments always appreciated, by the way)…but I decided to go for the simple approach of setting up an MBR/DOS onto the Kohjinsha’s HDD.
One specific command to select the target drive for the XP install, didn’t seem to work well at all: WINNT /T:D:
(Where D: is the HDD when booting into DOS via the USB key)
Lots of trial-and-error here, but here is the approach that worked flawlessly for the Kohjinsha:
Boot into DOS via the USB key.
At the command line, run fdisk to partition the HDD. Do make sure you’ve selected you internal HDD drive!
Next, make the HDD bootable with:
Format C:/s
The command will copy all DOS system files to your HDD. Again, this may seem like an unnecessary step, but if you’re using the Kohjinsha, it’s the easiest (only?) way to be sure the XP installer targets the HDD properly!
Step 6: Reboot and load DOS from the HDD.
Okay, reboot and change your BIOS boot order to boot the HDD first. If all is well, you should have booted into DOS from the HDD.
Step 7: Installing XP to the HDD via USB key
From the DOS prompt, navigate to your USB key. This should be D:\ drive.
This is a good time to run SmrtDrv.exe, as this will grease the proverbial wheels of the install process.
Next, head to the \i386 folder and run WINNT.exe
Voila! This should start the XP installer from your USB key!
0 comments:
Post a Comment