Installing Windows from a phone

Arthur : “You mean you can see into my mind ?”
Marvin: “Yes.”
Arthur: “And … ?”
Marvin: “It amazes me how you manage to live in anything that small”

Looking back down the recent posts you might notice that this is the 8th in a row about my new phone (so it’s obviously made something of an impression), this one brings the series to a close.

I’ve said already that I bought at 16GB memory card for the new phone which is a lot – I had 1GB before, so… what will I do with all that space? I’m not going to use it for video and 16GB is room for something like 250 hours of MP3s or 500 hours of WMAs: I own roughly 200 albums, so it’s a fair bet they’d fit. Photos – well maybe I’d keep a few hundred MB on the phone. In any event, I don’t want to fill the card completely. After a trip out with no card in the my camera I keep a SD-USB card adapter on my key-ring so I always have both a USB stick and a memory card : currently this uses my old micro-SD card in an full size SD adapter. If I need more than 1GB I can whip the card out of the phone, pop it in the adapter and keep shooting 

However the phone has a mass storage device mode so I thought to myself why not copy the Windows installation files to it, and see if I can boot a Machine off it and install Windows from the phone ? That way one could avoid carrying a lot of setup disks.
Here’s how I got on.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  hi. I would recommend that you go through the steps in the video (run disk part, clean, create a new partition, activate it and format it) In theory you should be able to use diskpart to flag the partition on the disk active, and then use bootsect (in the bootfolder on the dvd) to stamp a nt60 bootsector and Mbr on the card. However I have done this in the past and ended up losing the contents of the disk. So Back up before trying !

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Awesome! Thanks! Also, do you know if something like this is possible for Windows XP? I have tried to use the bootable USB device (with Grub4Dos) and WinXP would crash during the installation. I forgot the error code, but I believe it's a well-known error. dimaj

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Oddly enough I haven't read the new book. I always preferred the radio the books anyway. The film was wrong. I wanted to be open minded about it but I couldn't manage it, but I know the original too well - any change was always going to jar. (Wish I could be sure who you are FG. I've got my guess of course).

• Anonymous
  February 08, 2010
  First of all, I'd like to thank you for this post - This is awesome! I have a question though... Do I have to format my storage card? Can I get away with just copying files over (as long as storage card is FAT32) or is diskpart also creating a boot partition there? Thanks! dimaj

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2010
  Yes, but what do you think of the new Hitchhikers' book? What did you think of the film by the way?