Installing Windows 7 on a HP Mini 2140

As the 2140 does not contain a DVD drive it’s necessary to do the install off a USB key. The interblag contains a number of articles describing how to accomplish this (for instance here) however to install I found a small modification to be necessary. The USB key I was using is 4Gb which the BIOS turns out to be unable to read. During the partition of the USB key specifying SIZE=3072 enables the BIOS to read it and is sufficient to contain the Windows 7 install files.

Saturday, June 27, 2009 4:27 PM

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# re: Installing Windows 7 on a HP Mini 2140

Hmmm, not sure if I am facing the same problem as you (trying to install Win7 from 4GB USB stick on 2140): at boot time I pick "USB Hard Disk" as the boot drive (other choice is the internal drive). After a little while the system hangs with "F10 = ROM based setup" displayed at the bottom.

So I looked into resizing my USB stick. Wasn't quite sure how to use SIZE=3072 in diskpart, but there's a "SHRINK" command that I used to shrink my USB stick to < 3GB. Alas, it didn't fix anything; same hang when booting with the stick.

Sadly/surprisingly my older 2133 has no problems with the same USB stick.

Any ideas?

Left by Oliver at 7/12/2009 8:56 AM

# re: Installing Windows 7 on a HP Mini 2140

Well, a 10 second Google search helped find the SIZE option. Alas, that didn't change anything for me.

Left by Oliver at 7/12/2009 9:25 AM

# re: Installing Windows 7 on a HP Mini 2140

As it works on mine all I can think of is that a different BIOS version ('m running F.01) may have different USB hard disk support. But that's pure speculation.

Left by Colin Scott at 7/12/2009 2:20 PM

# re: Installing Windows 7 on a HP Mini 2140

Thanks. Mine has F.03 and there's a new F.04 on HP's website, but that doesn't seem to have a fix for the issue unless they forgot to mention it.

In any case, I've solved my problem by throwing money at the problem (went to Fry's and bought a $70 portable DVD writer). With that, install of Win7 went through without a hitch. On the one hand, it's annoying to "have" to buy a piece of hardware, on the other hand time's money, too.

Left by Oliver at 7/13/2009 12:22 AM

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Installing Windows 7 on a HP Mini 2140

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