Unusual Problem - Please Help!

[martin122089]

OK so here is the deal. I have a HP Mini 1000 netbook with an eight GB hard drive (other specs aren't important for this discussion). It originally came with Ubuntu, but I wanted to try Windows 7 out on it. So I got a copy from my university's software store and proceeded to figure out how to put it on the tiny netbook hard drive.

After a few days of searching, huzzah! I had found a method that would compress the whole installation so that even my tiny hard drive should have about two GB of storage left on it after the install.

For those of you that would like to view the method, here is the link:

How To Install Windows 7 On Almost Any Netbook - Windows 7 netbook installation - Gizmodo.

So everything went great and I now have a workable copy of Windows 7 on my netbook. Here is the problem; how do I get the darn thing off of there?

I have decided that it is time to sell the netbook for a more powerful machine, but I do not want to give away my Windows 7 copy as it was free and I would like to install it on another computer that I have at home. I want to install something like Ubuntu on it again, but there is not enough space on the hard drive for the new installation to fit (only about 1.3 GB is all I can free up).

So I guess my real question is how do I get Windows 7 off and put Ubuntu on? I can't boot from a usb stick as (for some strange and mystifying reason) my boot manager is missing. I can't install from within Windows because I don't have enough hard drive space. I can't burn a cd and burn an image to it because the machine is a netbook without a disk drive (although I could quit being cheap and go out and by an external disk drive...). What do you guys recommend I do?

Is there a method to totally wipe everything off of a hard drive and start with basically a BIOS that you could boot a usb stick from?

Please someone help me because this is driving me nuts!

Thanks!

 

[not so gray matter]

In order to remove Windows you'll need some sort of external media to boot to. You could use a USB Stick, or a DVD, but as mentioned those don't work. I'd suggest you borrow a usb dvd drive to write a dvd and then delete windows.

There may be a way to connect to your netbook hard drive from another computer but you'd have to research it.


NOTE: You may not be able to boot to your USB Stick because you're forgetting to change the boot order via BIOS.

 

[martin122089]

I'll have to try those suggestions out. The boot order isn't the problem (I don't think). When the usb stick is in I press F8 at the boot up screen, choose the usb stick, and then the "BOOTMGR IS MISSING PRESS CTRL+ALT+DEL TO RESTART" pops up.

Do you mean changing the boot order in the BIOS? I don't think I've tried that yet.

***Oops, that's obviously what you meant.

 

[gregrocker]

When you can boot the Win7 installer, select Custom install and use Drive Tools to delete all on the HD.

If this fails, install free Partition Wizard and Wipe HD. It will restart to Apply task from memory.

Isn't there a tool on Linux installer to clean/delete the HD first, or can you overwrite 7?