Windows 7 on fit-PC Slim with no USB-DVD reader (close, but no cigar)

General
I run a Fit-PC Slim headless on Windows XP Pro as a media server (squeezebox), print server and with iTunes too.  Probably too much for this little box at times but it works well enough. Apart from when iTunes wants input.  Sadly when I used the excellent nLite to make a cut down version of XP I left out something vital for iTunes.  When iTunes starts it says it has a grave error and I have to click OK to continue.  I have looked in to it but no joy.  It is a pain to RDS in to click OK every time that the fit-PC reboots!

I was idly wondering about Windows 7 on the fit-PC when I found a thread on the fit-PC forums that left people hanging.  jjkarns was going to try this install in January 2009 and report back.  There was no report back.  A cursory search of the internet (I was not too keen to find out if this had been done before) got me thinking.

Today I had a bonus day off work, and with the kids at school I thought it might be fun to try to put Windows 7 on my little box.  It only has 512MB RAM (and some of *that* is syphoned off to VGA…) but I have heard rumours of Windows 7 working on low spec machines.  I also have a spare IDE drive that I thought was dead but repeated disk scans on Ubuntu and Windows showed *said* it was OK so I borrowed a USB keyboard from work and set to.

First effort: Booting from USB Key (fail)

I don’t have a USB CD-ROM available so had to get the fit-PC to boot from a USB Key.  I had not had much success with this in the past, but I found a thread on the fit-PC slim forums and fixed it by making the C: drive NAND Flash and the default boot c:.

Next I had to make the Windows USB boot disk.  I found a helpful thread on TechNet (“Use a USB Key to Install Windows 7—Even on a Netbook”), but when I ran diskpart on my work XP machine it only found one disk.  diskpart worked as advertised on my Windows 7 home laptop…

This was all new to me, so, somewhat excited I plugged the beautiful new USB boot disk in to the fit-PC slim and switched it on.  And got the following message:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause.  To fix the problem:
<< blah blah repair your computer >>

File: \Boot\BCD

Status: 0xc000000e
Info: An error occured while attempting to read boot configuration data

This was somewhat disappointing!  I put it down to the USB key being faulty so tried it on my Windows 7 PC.  It worked perfectly first time.  Googling up the error code was not super successful.  Loads of people have the problem and I couldn’t easily find any solutions.  Time to try something new.


Second effort: Booting from External USB Disk (fail)


My next cunning plan was to boot from the IDE disk, mounted in USB caddie.  I’d already formatted this with fat32 and worked out that to make it an active boot partition I could use diskpart with the following commands

diskpart
select disk 1
select partition 1
active

I copied over Windows 7 once more whilst pondering what BIOS settings for the fit-PC.  USB Hard Disk?  IDE drive? If it worked the plan was to stop the installation when it reboots and whack the drive back in to the fit-PC.  Selecting “IDE 0 Pri Master” or “IDE 1/ Pri Slave” in CMOS was a fail, as was “USB Hard disk”.  I tried “PCMCIA” and “USB Floppy” too.


Later (see below) I realised that this was never going to work because the disk couldn’t boot by itself after all.  And I should have just slapped it in to the fit-PC shouldn’t I!


Third effort: Installing on another machine and swapping disk at critical moment



I am lucky enough to have an IDE laptop that the kids use for Sims2 etc. Whilst the cat’s away…  My next idea was to continue the plan of starting the installation on one machine and finishing it on another when it is in the middle of a reboot.   I replaced the disk in the laptop and booted with my USB stick from effort 1.  At this point I realised that I should have just stuck the disk I created in the previous step in the fit-PC and tried to boot from it.  I tried doing that on the laptop and it didn’t boot!  So maybe my diskpart commands were faulty.Oops.  I am typing this as I go, so maybe that will be the next try.
I set up a 20GB partition and then watched the Windows 7 installation carefully.  It expands the windows files and then starts installing, but I could not remember when it reboots and I wanted to catch that.  I know it goes through a major detection of hardware at some point, but is was that before or after the reboot?  It kept on going (Windows is so much better and quicker at installing nowadays) and after four green ticks it went down for reboot.  I switched off and plugged back in to the fit-PC.


Bingo!  

Windows 7 attempting to start on fit-PC slim





The disk light started flashing, up came the Windows 7 logo and then a long, long wait on:


Setup is updating registry settings

I put this down to low memory and Windows 7 detecting (re-detecting?) the machine it was installed on.  After 10 minutes it rebooted.  It took a long, long time to show anything other than the “Starting Windows” logo.  After two minutes the disk light stopped flashing and my little fit-PC just sat there sadly.  At this point I began to lose faith.  Will I damage my main media server for ever with all this plugging in and out of disks?  How long do I wait for any “Windows 7 action”?  After 8 minutes there was depressing noise like the disk spinning down.  With no action at all on the screen I decided to wait another 5 minutes before giving it up as an “epic fail” and getting back to trying to fix the issue with iTunes not starting under XP Pro.


At 9 minutes the disk light flickered feebly and there were more clicks from the disk.  I wondered whether it needed a mouse to continue so plugged one in.  The disk access light flashed enthusiastically (something was alive in there) but I was still stuck on the “Starting Windows” screen.


At 11 minutes I lost patience, pulled the plug and restarted, choosing the “Start Windows normally” option with some optimism.  Next time “Safe Mode” I thought.  Again, it didn’t work.


Safe Mode didn’t work either.


As a good scientist I need a conclusion, which is this:  Windows 7 does not work on my fit-PC when I try to install it.  Please let me know if you do better.