I have been trying different ways for the past week with no luck ,

I have been googling and Searching forum after forum , trying all the different ways people have done it ,

in face I have done it before twice now.

I have tried a number of differnet USB thumb drives , 2Gb and 8 GB drives

seems the most common issue I'm having is grub4dos says it can't install and goes on to installing MBR , but when I boot to the USB drive

it either just says can't boot from it . or it skips step one option and only shows step 2 gui ,

it's becoming very frustrating .

I have tried the following progrmas

Wintoflash

winsetuptoUSB

manual files

PEtoUSB

Bootsect

USB_prep8

USB Multiboot

all of which have fail on me , with all my usb drives .

USB multi even told me that I didn't have fat fat32 or NTFS and I couldn't go any further , I tried formating with both PE and HP format programs.

I have noticed that I had go in the the properties of each program and run as admin.or it wouldn't find my usb drive or give me other nasty errors .

i'm not sure if my whole problem is i'm using my windows 7 laptop.

the usb install is for my dell mini 9 .

so it has no optical drive

I just removed ubunto linux from it to load windows xp back on.

whats a good base to start with ?

Lets go step by step.

Get WInSetupFromUSB 1.0 beta6:

http://www.datafilehost.com/download-deec7fdd.html

Extract it somewhere using 7-zip or other software supporting 7z archives:

http://www.7-zip.org/

Use your 2GB drive.

Start WInSetupFromUSB if required with admin privileges (Windows should ask you for this) and press RMPrepUSB button and use the following options, don't touch others:

FAT16, Boot as HDD, XP/WinPE v1

Press Prepare drive and once finished close RMPrepUSB.

Next select your Windows source and tick the option "test in QEMU". Press GO.

If some error comes up please mention it and attach with your next post WinSetupFromUSB.log file found in program directory. You may have to zip it first if too large or board software doesn't allow .log files to be attached.

Does it start fine in QEMU?

Close QEMU and WinSetupFromUSB. Move the USB stick to the computer in question, use "safely remove hardware icon" when disconnecting the USB stick. Start from USB.

How far does it go?