Techline 4 Teens > Reinstalling Windows on a Netbook

Most net books have a recovery partition that can be used to restore windows on the computer. If you have just lost access to that partition, then you can access it with Grub4Dos, which can be installed on a usb flshdrive.

However, sometimes the recovery partition is gone, broken, or simply never existed. There are some methods out there to fix this, however, they often don’t work. This method is clean, simple, smart, and leaves you with a still-usefull usb drive in the end!

First, you need to obtain a U3 smart drive, they can be found here or even at staples.

If you have a U3 smart drive, then a cd drive will be visible in My Computer, don’t worry if you uninstalled U3 from your drive, it will still work.

This CD is like 6MB and is stupid and irritating (starting to wonder why I said you needed it?) However useless this CD is, we can make this CD into the Windows install disk. Pretty clever, right?

You will need the Universal Customizer. Which you can download from me here. Unzip the file, and open up the resulting folder, in here you will find a folder called “BIN”, open this folder and replace the blank “U3CUSTOM.ISO” with a windows xp install disk iso (can be made from a win xp home disk or can be downloaded off of the internet)

If you need an xp iso, you can download it off TPB, email me if you have any questions/concerns.

Once you have replaced the file, simply plug in your U3 USB device, and run “Universal_Customizer.exe” follow the onscreen steps, set a password, and wait until the progress bar comes up, it will instantly get to 50%, and then take hours to complete, this will take some time.

When it is done, reboot your computer (hold F12 if using an Acer Aspire 1, or hold any other key in order to access your boot menu in order to boot off the virtual CD drive. Once you successfully boot, go through the standard install steps, your serial number in probably on the bottom of your netbook.