As I promised in my post yesterday about how much I love the EeePC now that XP is installed I wanted to digress for a little dork out session on how to do this.  It's not hard but does take some planning and a little work.  A lot of credit goes to this post which is where I got started.

Prerequisites
- A USB thumb drive, at least 1GB in size
- SD Memory card, at least 16MB
- Windows XP SP2 Installation CD
- Physdiskwrite (download here)
- Boot disk image (download here)
- A second PC with a SD reader/USB to set the above up

Creating the boot disk
First we need to make our SD card bootable so we can get into DOS mode to start the XP installation.  To do this extract physdiskwrite.exe to a folder on your PC.  Place the wxpboot.ima file in this same folder and insert your SD card into your PC.  Drop to a command prompt, switch to that directory and type in:

physdiskwrite -u wxpboot.ima

WARNING: Make sure you choose the correct drive number when doing this (it was 1 for me) - if you choose the wrong one you will wipe your entire system, this would be bad so be very careful here.  This process should only take a few seconds.

Copy XP to the USB Thumb drive
Next you'll need to insert the USB thumb drive into your PC along with the XP SP2 CD.  Next copy the i386 directory from the XP CD to the root of your thumb drive.

Beginning the install
Once you've got XP on your thumb drive insert it into the left side USB port on the EeePC (the side with only 1 USB port - this will make sure it shows up as D: later).  Put the SD card in the EeePC and power it on.  As it boots press F2 to get into the BIOS - you'll need to change "OS Installation" to "Start".  Press F10 to exit BIOS and reboot.  Now you should boot from the SD card and eventually come to a C: prompt.

Next you'll need to repartition the EeePC using fdisk so at a command prompt type "fdisk" and press enter.  You'll need to go through and delete ALL partitions from the disk (ALL of them, including the non-DOS ones).  Once you've deleted them all you'll need to create one primary partition to fill the entire drive.  Now exit out of fdisk so we can format the drive by running "format c: /s" (the /s switch makes the disk bootable for us).

Installing XP
Now that you've got the drive all formatted you're ready to begin the XP install.  If you put the thumb drive in the correct port it will show up as your D: drive so all you need to do is switch to that drive, then cd to the i386 directory.  Once there type "winnt" to begin the install of XP.  On my machine I was using a very old USB card reader with a 2GB MiniSD card in it for the install.  The first part of install, up until the point at which it starts copying files to the system took about 15 minutes if I remember right.  The next part however took just a bit longer.

Finishing the install
So how long did it take?  It took so long I was able to eat dinner, sleep, shower, go to work, eat, sleep, shower, go to work - then it was finally finished with the first phase of copying the install files to the system.  It took more than 48 hours to do this on my system!  I'm not exactly sure why but the good news is the next phases of install were crazy fast taking less than an hour if memory serves right.  Go through the install just like any other XP installation.

Drivers
The last thing you'll need when you are done are all the XP drivers.  Fortunately Asus is already providing them which I think is outstanding for a company that doesn't even ship XP on this box.  Hell I can't get drivers this easy for Alienware boxes and those come with Windows! So browse on over to Asus driver pages and download away.  The only thing I haven't been able to get to work are the function/volume keys, not really sure why.

Conclusion
I'm hoping that like me once you get XP on the EeePC it will become much more useful for you.  I don't mean to at all diminish the Linux stuff they put on it but for me that just wasn't a very useful platform.  I've been stunned with how well the EeePC runs XP, if the keyboard were slightly bigger I think I could use it as a my primary device at home (for times when I'm just doing quick type stuff).

Well done Asus, well done.