I recently purchased an HP Mini 1035NR with Windows XP loaded on it. The first thing I needed to do was remove XP and install a better operating system. My OS of choice for the Mini was Windows 7. Being a small netbook, it doesn’t have a built-in optical drive. This wouldn’t be a problem if I had an external USB optical drive handy, but at the time I did not.

The solution is to use the built-in PXE network boot. The first thing you need to do is setup TFTPBoot on another machine. You can find the step-by-step walkthrough for doing that at Ryan T. Adams’ blog. Basically you download the TFTPBoot package from his blog and make a few settings changes. Follow his blog until step 6. A couple words of wisdom when you’re setting up TFTPBoot. You either need to connect the computer with TFTPBoot to the HP Mini 1000 with a crossover cable or if you do it through the network you will need to temporarily disable your DHCP server while you’re installing Windows 7.

You need to put the Windows 7 DVD in the computer with TFTPBoot and share the optical drive, giving everyone read access. You will also need to make sure your firewall is turned off.

Assuming you have setup TFTPBoot correctly and networked the two machines together we can continue. Startup the HP Mini 1000 and press F10 as soon as you see the option to. Inside the BIOS settings you need to go to System Configuration> Boot Options> Enable Internal Network Adapter Boot. Save the changes and reboot by pressing F10. Once the machine reboots press F12 for network boot as soon as you’re given the option. If everything is setup correctly it should boot into a Windows Vista BE environment and you will be presented with a command prompt.

Now if you were to do an ipconfig, you’re not going to get anything. The reason is because the PE environment doesn’t have the driver for the network card in the Mini 1000. First thing you will need to do is download the 32-bit Vista drive for the network card. At the time of writing this, I believe all of the HP Mini’s in the 1000 series are using the Yukon Marvell network card. If this is changed in the future you will need to download the appropriate driver and be sure to note the INF file to use with the driver loader below.  You can download the Marvell 32-bit Vista driver here. Extract the contents of the file to a marvell folder on a USB drive.

Plug the USB drive into the Mini. Assuming the Marvell directory is at the root of the USB drive, type the following: drvload d:\marvell\yk60×86.inf

You can verify that this worked by running ipconfig again. Now you need to map the shared optical drive from the TFTPBoot computer by typing the following: net use y: \\IP_TO_TFTPBOOT_PC\share_name /USER:hostname_of_tftpboot_pc\USERNAME password

Assuming the mapping worked correctly, can now run setup.exe from the Y drive and install Windows 7.