Introduction
First of all, I want to thank everyone who provided feedback on my guide, Install Vista on Dell Mini 9 (USB). It has been a pleasure to give back to the community. As a thanks, I have added title pictures to the Vista guide as well as this one. (I know; I’m cheap.) That also means that I’ll be writing the same sort of guide for Windows 7! I finally convinced my girlfriend to let me at her Mini 9. I have been playing with the Windows 7 builds since build 7000 leaked (that’s all that’s been on my new gaming machine, actually) and I am very pleased with the new OS. As everyone knows, Windows 7 is what Vista was supposed to be, but Microsoft released way too early. But this is another topic; installing Windows 7 on the Dell Mini 9 is very similar to the Vista installation, but I have decided to rewrite an entirely new guide just to eliminate any confusion over small differences. I will do my best to make the guide as similar to the Vista instructions, and I’ll even be pulling sections word for word. As always, feedback is always appreciated.
Required
- Dell Mini 9 (duh)
- Another computer with a Windows operating system (preferably Vista or Windows 7)
- USB Flash drive (at least 2GB, although that’s assuming you are stripping the install with vLite…if not you’ll need a 4GB drive) If enough people express interest in an alternative method I will write a guide for installing Vista over the network. Flash drive prices are plummeting with the growing popularity flash chips (due mostly to solid state drives) so a 4GB drive isn’t all that expensive anymore. Still, network installs can be easier if set up correctly and are a damn fun accomplishment to have under your belt.
- Windows 7 CD/DVD/ISO (I used the 32-bit RC build 7100 ISO)
- vLite (optional)
Step 1 – Prepare USB Flash Drive
These instructions I pulled from http://dellmini9.blogspot.com/2008/09/no-dvd-rom-no-worries.html but cleaned up for easier reading.
- Insert the flash drive into your Windows machine and back up anything from the flash drive that you wanted to keep. We’re going to reformat it.
- Open up a command prompt.
- Type diskpart and press Enter. After a second you should have the prompt DISKPART>
- Type list disk. A list of your connected hard drives will appear. Make sure you see your flash drive on the list. In the example below my 4GB flash drive is Disk 2.
- Type select disk 2 but change the disk number to whatever your drive is. Make sure you get this right. If you continue with these steps on the wrong disk you’ll end up erasing all of that drive’s contents. Be careful.
- Type clean. It should only take a few seconds to clean.
- Now type create partition primary. This command should complete almost immediately.
- Type select partition 1
- Type active
- Type format fs=fat32 to format the flash drive. This took about 6 minutes on my drive.
- Lastly, type assign and then exit
- Format complete! You can close the command prompt
Command - DISKPART
Step 2 – Reduce Vista Installation (Optional)
The Dell Mini 9 comes with a solid state harddrive which is a blessing and a curse. On the plus side you get better read/write/seek speeds, improved battery life, and better shock protection than rotating platter hard drives. Unfortunately it’s still an expensive technology, and the price-per-gig of solid state drives is much higher. The Mini 9s come with a 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and now even a 32GB drive. I have the 16GB drive and you definitely want as much space as you can get with this smaller drives. The software vLite will take Windows 7 Install media and provide tons of customization and stripping options. You can skip this step and go straight to loading Vista on the flash drive, but I would highly recommend it, especially for smaller drives.
These instructions cover the process I followed. I would definitely like to develop this process to obtain the smallest install size possible, though, so please post any tips you come across and I’ll keep checking the dellmini9 blog for more useful tidbits.
- Download and install vLite v1.2 Final
- vLite requires the WAIK to run, but after installing it and restarting vLite still said that I needed it. The fix for me was to download the Windows Imaging Driver and extract the three files into the vLite Program Files directory. For more vLite installation help please visit their forum and post your situation in the comments here. If there is a common problem I’ll add the solution to the guide.
- Insert your Windows 7 DVD/CD or mount your Windows 7 ISO. I used an ISO but the steps will be the same. (Make sure you have at least 4-5GB of space on your computer.)
- Load up vLite and browse to your disk drive with the Windows 7 installation media
- vLite will ask you where to copy the files to your hard drive to modify them. Create a directory wherever is easiest for you. I chose C:\vlite_temp
- After you click OK vLite will procedd to copy all of the files from the Windows 7 installation media to your hard drive. This will take a few minutes. After copying the files vLite will analyze your install quickly and display the available versions of the Windows 7 you can choose to strip. I chose Windows 7 ULTIMATE.
- vLite will now give you some information about the operating system which you can read at your leisure and press Next to continue. vLite will give you a list of Tasks that it can run on your Windows 7 installation files.
- Since this guide is meant for decreasing the install size I will only focus on Components, Tweaks, and Unattended setup, since these Tasks will let you strip the install to the bare minimum. Check those three Tasks. Integration is always something interesting to look into as you can slipstream service packs and updates into your install, but since it means a bigger initial install we’ll ignore it for now. We don’t need to create a Bootable ISO since we will just be copying these files to the flash drive instead of burning a CD/DVD, so we’ll ignore that too. The installation actually never gave me the choice to “tweak” anything, so the available tweaks probably aren’t compatible with Windows 7 like they were with Vista. If your process prompts you about it please post your experience in the comments section. Go ahead and click next.
- The next screen will have a pop up asking what features or applications that you plan to use. This will be up to you but this is the configuration I used:
- Click OK and you will now be able to further customize the install by choosing components to remove. This is also up to your preferred configuration, but I will post mine:
- Click Apply, and vLite will ask you which method to use. You can select the first option, Rebuild one (Ultimate), and hit OK. vLite will begin the removal process. Since I didn’t integrate any hotfixes and only really stripped data out of the install, the process only took about 25 minutes for me.
- Once it finishes you can hit Finish, and the program will close. Check out how big the Windows 7 installation folder is on your hard drive. I bet it’s a lot smaller than the original files!
Selecting Destination Location
Windows 7 Versions
vLite Compatibility Options
I didn’t check anything in the Applications tab so I didn’t bother posting a screenshot. As far as I know this tab merely checks the programs on your current machine that rely on Vista system files so that you don’t remove something that those programs really need. Since this install isn’t even meant for this computer anyway I found no use for this tab.
I intentionally left System Restore off because it uses so much space. With a 16GB hard drive (or less) I’m not too worried about losing anything. It’s not meant to be a main machine. I don’t need it wasting precious space just duplicating my data in a backup.
Removing Accessories
I removed Speech Support because never once have I felt the urge to “talk” my computer through anything. That’s just 450MB of wasted space to me.
Removing Drivers
I removed the Ethernet and modem drivers since Windows Update will download and install just the ones it needs. The other drivers are wasted space since the Mini 9 doesn’t even have any of this hardware anyway. If you hook up a scanner or printer in the future Windows Update will just download the appropriate driver anyway. You can save about 800MB of space by doing this (printer drivers alone take up 700MB).
Removing Hardware Support
Again, the things I checked were for hardware I knew I wouldn’t need or use. I kept the networking hardware features since the Mini 9 will stress a lot of network usage since it’s so small and low capacity.
I checked the entire Languages section. You save an entire 1.1GB by doing this. I never need other languages but if worst comes to worst they are very easy to install from Windows Update later.
Removing Multimedia
I removed all codecs since I’ll be installing the K-lite Mega Codec Pack which has all of them. I have always hated the sample movies, pictures, and music so I removed those, and I don’t plan on editing movies on the Mini 9 so goodbye Movie Maker. I much prefer XBMC to Media Center so that’s gone too.
All I removed in the Network section was Windows Mail. Like I mentioned above, I’ll be needing as many network features as possible, so I was pretty lenient with this. Plus, the file size for this entire section is only 151MB. I left the Services section completely alone. I didn’t want to disable something that I would end up needing later, and this section is only 155MB. Feel free to remove service at your leisure but your mileage may vary.
Removing System
I’ve never found Windows Help useful, so goodbye. Since I already disabled Speech, the 550MB of Natural Language support is useless. The rest is personal preference to remove small features.
Removing System (part 2)
Tablet PC is useless to me since the Mini 9 has no touch screen so that’s 391MB saved. System Restore isn’t a big install in itself, but the feature uses a lot of space as I’ve said before. I use WinRAR so I don’t need Zip Folder.
With these changes I have saved 3.7 GB by removing features I wouldn’t use anyway! I’m not even losing performance or functionality! Go vLite! Windows 7 uses a smaller footprint in installation size and while running, so this process is making an already optimized OS even better.
Step 3 – Transfer Windows 7 Install Files to USB Flash Drive
This is a pretty short step, and probably doesn’t even require an entire step anyway. But, if you didn’t do step 2, you need a nice home to land, so here you are:
- If you did follow step 2, copy the contents of your Windows 7 installation folder to your freshly formatted flash drive
- If you didn’t follow step 2, copy the contents of your Windows 7 installation media (DVD/CD/ISO) to your freshly formatted flash drive
When your copy completes you can close all windows looking at the flash drive and use the Safely Remove Hardware feature to remove the drive.te
Step 4 – Install Windows 7 from USB Flash Drive
- With the Mini 9 powered off insert the flash drive into any of the available USB ports and turn the Mini 9 on
- When the Dell symbol pops up hit the number ‘0′ to load the Boot Menu
- Choose USB Storage and press Enter; the Windows 7 installation should begin!
- Depending on what you selected in vLite’s Unattended Install section (if anything) you’ll get various prompts during the install process. Proceed according to a normal Windows 7 installation. The only prompt that may be confusing is the drive/partition configuration stage. Because of the small size of the hard drives in these netbooks I doubt anyone will be wanting to dual-boot. Here are the steps for wiping the drive and installing just Windows 7:
- Select the only Disk/Partition that should be listed (if you have more than one, say from previous Windows 7 or Linux installations you can perform 2-4 below on all of them)
- Click the Advanced options link
- Select Delete
- Click OK to confirm the pop up
- You should only have Disk 0 Unallocated Space listed, so click Next (don’t bother creating a new partition, the install will now do it automatically)
- So begins the install. Copying the files will take about 30 seconds, expanding the files will take about 15 minutes, and the rest (including two restarts) can take up to 30 more minutes. It will sit at Completing installation… for quite some time.
- Windows 7 will perform some performance tests on the first startup after installation, and then you’ll be asked to create a user and set the computer name. Continue through the next few prompts (serial, password, wireless network, etc) as per a usual install. It was nice to see that Windows 7 supported the Mini 9’s wireless card “out of the box”.
- Welcome to your new Windows 7 desktop! Here is a screenshot of my girlfriend’s 16GB SSD usage. Does this convince anyone that stripping Windows 7 down is useful?
Windows 7 "Stripped" Disk Usage
Step 5 – Initial Setup
Unlike with the Vista installation, Windows 7 detects and has drivers for the video and wireless devices, so that is one annoying step eliminated. Still, there are a few devices that are not recognized by default. First we will need to run Windows Update. My Windows Update kept failing with error code 80072F8F until I realized that the date was set to May of 2008. After correcting the date and time Windows Update threw an error 80072EE2. I just hit the Try Again button and eventually got the Windows is up to date message. If you have any available updates now would be a good time to apply them.
After applying any available updates navigate to the “Start Orb”, right-click on Computer, and select Manage. Select the Device Manager from the tree to the left, and you should see three devices on the right with yellow exclamation mark icons indicating that Windows has trouble locating drivers for these devices. To future-proof this guide you can try to right-click on each of these devices and select Update Driver Software… In the window that pops up select Search automatically for updated driver software to see if these devices has drivers in the Microsoft database. At the time of writing this guide I had no luck, so if this is still the case for you continue on to install these drivers manually.
First, we’ll want to install Dell’s battery meter software. You don’t actually need the software, so you can uninstall it immediately afterwards. All we need is the driver is installs and leaves on your machine. Go ahead and download it here. After installing restart the computer and uninstall the Battery Meter software if you wish.
After this you should only have two unknown devices in Device Manager, both called Base System Device. This is due to the Dell JMicron device which Microsoft is not able to provide the driver for, for some reason. Windows 7 still makes this an easy fix as the new Action Center will provide the solution. If you don’t have an Action Center pop-up in the Notification Area (bottom right-hand of the screen next to the time/date) then you can just open up the “Start Orb” and start typing “Action Center” to get a link to it. You should see an alert about the JMicron device, and clicking on the alert will provide you with a direct Dell, Inc. link to the driver download. Click on it, select Run, and follow the instructions to install the last driver.
Conclusion
You are now ready to enjoy the goodness that is Windows 7! Your Device Manager should be free of Unknown Devices. I hope this guide is as useful as the Vista installation guide. It has certainly been a pleasure to contribute to the community that I have learned so much from. As always, please post any concerns or suggestions.
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Errm i dont seem to be able to find an option to disable hibernations – would you be able to walk me through this…
As for connectin my mini to my dell monitor, ill probably look up a VGA cable on ebay or something.
Also i will be able to give you the model of the TV once i get back to my house in a day or two – cheers again mate.
rick, when I installed Windows 7, I couldn’t get the Action Center to diagnose and/or find the drivers for the 2 Base System Devices that need drivers. How did you do it?
@Iforaneye
Hm, apparently it’s not as easy as I suspected. This link should help you out: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/819-hibernate-enable-disable.html
@hoops10
Honestly, it just kinda happened for me. The Action Center popped up letting me know that there were a few errors to fix, and one of them was for the drivers. It said that it couldn’t download the drivers automatically, but gave me a link from which to grab them. If you look up a bit you can find a link to the driver for the JMicron SD card slot, which should be the driver you need.
rick, any luck working on that network install guide? I have been a lot of googling but no luck in finding out how to do it.
No progress yet, unfortunately. I have been very busy with work and school, and my girlfriend lives about 2 hours away with the Mini 9. As soon as I get the opportunity I will certainly work up a guide.
hey rick, are all usb drives supposed to be able to setup correctly?
because first i used an old pny 2gb drive, and it installed fine. but then i used a 2gb sandisk cruzer, and it stopped midway into the installation and said “make sure you have all setup files” “setup will now close”. then i used a 2gb imation nano drive, and it did the same thing.
do you know which usb drives will work for sure?
“Windows cannot install required files. The file may be corrupt or missing. Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation. Error code: 0×80070570″
its the same problem as last time. but i can’t find my pny usb anymore.
i read other ppl having problems too. should i flash my bios back to earlier version (its a04 right now)? or should i take out my 2gb ram for less ram?
nvm nvm. i just had to copy the files directly from the source. instead of copying it twice from a hard drive to another one and then to another one.
hey, i followed the direction to remove windows media codecs. however, my wmp won.t start. it says its missing mf.dll and some other .dll files.
how can i fix this?
You can do one of two things:
1.) Recreate your stripped ISO with vLite and ensuring you don’t remove too much
2.) Search for those .dll’s online and putting them in the correct location.
rick, did you make any other tweaks to the windows 7 iso than what you listed above? I just ordered a 16gb super talent ssd and I am going to put win7 on it. My last install of win7 on a 8 gb ssd died on me (the ssd died that is). Thanks.
No I have not, but I would try getting a hold of the RTM of Windows 7 and stripping that with vLite. The process should be the same. As it’s my girlfriend’s computer (and she uses it frequently), I haven’t been doing any modding.
Yeah I could find the RTM but will a RC key work with the RTM?
No, it won’t.
Is there a way to install Windows 7 on a Dell Mini 9 that has been hacked to run Mac OS 10.5.8 Leopard? Everything was going according to the plan, but after plugging in the flash drive and trying to start the installation from the .iso file, I’m only getting an error that says “Remove disks and other media, press any key to reboot” which leads me nowhere but rebooting and starting the OS X normally.
Any ideas would be MUCH appreciated!
I’m not familiar with the process to get OSX running on the Mini 9, but since OSX requires EFS to boot (as far as I know), I think it involves some BIOS hacking. Since that is the case, I’m not sure what you would need to do restore back to Windows 7. there are plenty of forums dedicated to running OSX on the Mini, so they will be able to help you better than I.
I hope I’m reading your comment incorrectly, but did you just throw the ISO on the flash drive?
Yes, yes I did: as you said yourself “copy the contents of your Windows 7 installation media (DVD/CD/ISO) to your freshly formatted flash drive”, so yeah, I just threw that on the flash drive. Was I not supposed to?
No, you should have thrown the contents of the ISO file, not the ISO file itself. You will need to extract the ISO file, which was hopefully done for you during the vLite step. If you skipped that step, however, then you will need to extract the ISO onto the flash drive.
Remember, the ISO is just like a RAR or ZIP file. You can access the contents from your OS because you have a program like WinZIP or WinRAR. Your BIOS, however, has no knowledge of these filetypes. You need the actual boot files from the ISO, as if you were burning it to a CD, so that the BIOS can see the actual files on the drive.
If you just have a flash drive with an ISO file on it, that’s your problem. Delete the ISO from it, and instead extract the files from your hard drive to your flash drive, and I suspect you will be able to boot from it just fine.
OK. Well, I missed that step, so I missed the fact and I copied the ISO directly. Nevermind now.
I copied the CONTENTS of the ISO directly to the flashdrive (no subfolders, no nothing). But, it did not fix the problem.
Now, when I choose to boot from USB storage device, I get this:
Intel UNDI, PXE-2.1 (build 082)
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation
For Realtek RTL8101E/8102E PCI-E Ethernet Controller v1.08 (080408)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.
Operating system not found.
And that’s it. Pressing a key get the exact same message. I don’t know why Realtek is getting involved in this in the first place, and I don’t know how much do you know about PCs, but I copied the whole thing so you have every piece of info.
I really don’t know why I’m getting this, so again, if you could help me a bit, I’d really appreciate it.
Thanks in advance.
PS. I googled it, and I found out that it tried to boot from LAN (why, I don’t know). I went into BIOS and disable booting from network. Tried to boot again from the USB storage, and this time all I’ve received is the last line of the previous error:
Operating system not found.
It’s still not even trying to boot the flash. Like you said, the BIOS was trying to boot from the NIC. Rather than bothering with the boot priority order, just follow step 4 above to boot from the flash drive. You can press ‘0′ when the Dell boots to get the boot menu. That will let you specifically select “USB Storage” as the boot device.
If THAT doesn’t work, then I am pretty confident that you have not prepared the flash drive for booting, and simply copied the files to the flash drive as-is. If that’s the case, then you have successfully skipped every step of the guide, and of course it won’t work
Like I said, I did every step, skipping only the optional vlite step. And everything went like it’s supposed to.
I tried preparing the USB flashdrive in cmd again, but this time, it wouldn’t let me: it says there’s nothing on it, also, when I do the “disk list”, it also shows that the flash drive is empty (0kb taken / 0kb available), even though the windows 7 install files are there.
OK got it figured out. I formatted the drive, and then I repeated the steps with the cmd. Copied everything to the USB drive once again and it worked.
Thanks!
Awesome! I’m glad it’s working for you. The issue with the disk space in DISKPART had me a bit baffled too, but I think that column is actually showing you how much unallocated space there is. It doesn’t check the free space on the partition, but rather how much space isn’t actually partitioned on the drive, which should be none or very little on most drives.
I wasn’t trying to insult you by the way. I was just being facetious. Let me know how Windows 7 works out!
I probably spoke too soon.
I did manage to install 7 after creating an XP boot drive, wiping off OS X, formatting the drive into a NTFS one and installing XP. Yes, it did take a lot of time as it sounds. Then, I was able to install 7, however, in the previous process a mere 2 GB of disk space vanished, so after installing Win Seven, I got only about 5GB left out of the original 16.
Anyhow, I tried to do all of your steps, including shrinking the installation file with Vlite.
The version that I was using was the RTM and I believe that’s where everything went wrong: after shrinking everything correctly, I’m able to set the installation off, but shortly after the installation files are copied, I receive an error 0×80070570 and the installation is canceled, saying that important files are missing. The point is, I didn’t remove anything other that you have in Vlite. Everything was checked/unchecked exactly as in the screens. So my best theory is that the version you were using and the one I’m using must be different.
The whole toying around took me about 3 days and again, I’m left with nothing.
It’s very possible that vLite removed something necessary from the Windows 7 RTM installation. I can’t really say, as I have only done this with the RC. I hope you get it figured out though. I would start on the http://www.mydellmini.com/ forums, as they have great resources on just this very thing.
[...] [...]
hi there,
i did installed vista in my mini, but now i have an issu with my USB stick, once i installed vista in it, i decided to format it to again use it to save my stuff. but now everytime i “safetly remove” it i get a blue screen. Any idea how to sort it out?
Can you pull the STOP code off of the blue screen? If it restarts too quickly for you to pull it, then boot into windows and follow these steps:
1.) Right-click on Computer and select Properties
2.) Select Advanced System Settings from the menu to the left
3.) Select Settings under Startup and Recovery
4.) Uncheck the Automatically Restart box.
Hi mate – its me again.
Errm i got bored of windows 7 so i installed xp pro back in – but now im driver-less! I went to the dell website and tried to download some drivers, but they dont seem to extract (i get an error code 150). Im completly badgered… any ideas would be very helpful mate.
Thanks
Jaz
Try downloading the drivers on another machine, extracting them on that machine, and then transferring them to your Mini 9 via USB flash drive.
Ok mate, ill give it a try.
Hi Rick,
Just wanted to say thanks for the guide. Windows 7 is running great on my dell now.
Hi Rick… Recently loaded Win 7 Premium Home Upgrade as a new install option 2 using Win 7 option to delete Ubuntu partitions on my 8gb 512 mb ram Mini9. Mostly followed your instructions But formated the USB flash drive as FAT32 with Vista; used your Dos instructions up to that point; originally copied the whole Win7 install folder to the USB and then moved them outside the folder to the USB root directory. Did not bother with the file stripper that you spend so much detail on as my USB flashdrive is 8gb. Installed without problems first try. Got a 6.7 of 7.5 GB SSD available. Set my SSD cache to fixed custom but recommended window of 200 to 957mb, so that Windows would not eat my remaining space with its huge file compatibily folder. Installed Opera and Intel 945 chipset graphics driver for 950 from the Intel site as a zip (exe was dead) setting their download and save to my 8gb SD… same with Open Office changed their file storgage defaults to the SD.
The only 2 problems I had/have are the Key would not register (but download worked for the Intel graphics drive)… I have stopped updating since… and my resulting Windows 7 has lots of files I do not want like IE8 and Languages and Styles and other samples… without these I would be lots smaller and could perhaps survive the 8bg.
Runs very fast and well on the very limited uses I have for it. Whenever I have time I will go back and try the reduced install size to further reduce the resulting size of Windows… however I think at 8gb Win 7 is designed to grow itself as it encounters old files and the is nothing you can do to avoid it.
So folks who have upgraded mini 9’s and those without like mine can all benefit from Win7 if like me they were befuddled by the many many new cutely named Umbuntu programs needed to run a fairly basic machine.
Hi, I just got my 32 GB SSD in the mail for my Dell Mini 9 and would like to install Windows 7 Ultimate on it. I have the Windows disk and 8gb flash drive. I see alot of updates and coments to you guide on how to make it better or to cut out some steps. My plan is to save as much space as possible so I am going to use vlite. Do you have an update guide? If so could you email it to me (or email me a .pdf vrsion of your guide as the one on this site is hard to see) along with any tips I may need? This is the first time I am doing something like this and I’m scared to death of destorying something. Thanks for your help.
The process should actually just be the same, and there’s really nothing to mess up. If it doesn’t work, you start over and try again! Good luck!
Nevermind about the .pdf version (I figured it out) but please still let me know about any tips, tricks or updates I should know about. Thanks.
I saw this comment on a forum you were on: “I found during my Windows 7 installation that you can use the newest version of vLite. The program only needs one file from the WAIK to work properly, and it’s a lot easier than downloading the entire kit. Just Google ‘wimgapi.dll’ and download it. If you then copy ‘wimgapi.dll’ into vLite’s root folder, the program will run perfectly.” , should I do it?
There’s no harm in trying is there? It will either work, or it won’t. If it does, you save some time. If it doesn’t, you’ll just need to download the full WAIK.