How to reinstall Windows on a Notebook PC with no CD / DVD drive

My friend’s daughter has a lightweight Sotec notebook PC with Windows XP. As often with the case of browsing the Internet with Windows XP logged in with Administrator privileges, in spite of the antivirus program in use, some virus crept in and was causing poor performance. Moreover, it corrupted some Window system file so that no hardware devices displayed in the device manager! And, the Network device went missing so that the Notebook could not connect to the Internet any more. The only solution I knew was to either run a repair using a Windows XP installation, or to reinstall Windows. But because this Notebook had no internal CD/DVD drive, I had to figure out how to create a bootable media from the USB port. Thankfully this particular Notebook has an option in the BIOS to boot from a USB device.

I attached an external IDE DVD drive to it using a IDE to USB connector, and set the boot settings in the BIOS to boot from the USB port. However for some reason the Notebook’s BIOS would not recognize my DVD drive. I knew there was no problem with the DVD drive itself.

I have a 2 gigabyte USB flash memory stick and plugged that into the USB slot. The Notebook’s BIOS recognized the stick! Now all I have to figure out is how to make the USB stick bootable with a Windows XP installation on it.

After some googling for the answer and after a couple failed attempts to make the USB stick bootable, I found an excellent free program called WintoFlash which did the job very well. The Notebook booted from the USB stick and gave me a menu. I chose the first menu item which ran the Windows installation program on the stick, If you’re technically savvy enough to be interested in reading this post, you’ll have no trouble figuring out the rest after downloading and installing this software. 🙂