As I have told about before, my second laptop is Asus EEE 901. It came with Windows pre-installed and it was very slow when I have unpacked it. There was almost no free space on C, and there were some program installed, and finally my decision to get rid of this stuff made me to try reinstalling operating system on this netbook.
Let me mention that I don’t have a USB DVD-ROM drive, that’s why I had to deal with flash disks. I have tried to create some bootable flash drives, and let me share the software that has a simple and user-friendly interface, and, of course, it’s free. It is called WinSetupFromUSB and you can download it using the link above. It allows you to create a bootable installation flash drive to install almost any version of Windows you like.
I have tries some flash drives, but none of them allowed me to boot. I have tried all possible BIOS settings, but result was the same each time: error message telling me “Reboot and select proper boot device”.
The solution was very simple, yet not documented. If you need to boot your EEE 901 netbook from a flash drive, you have to try hitting and holding-down the [Esc] key when the ASUS splash screen appears during the boot-up process. It will then show you the boot menu. I can’t understand the reason, and there are no official docs from ASUS (I haven’t found any of them).
I would like to say a special thank you to guy from Eeeuser forum, their solution really helped me to find out the simplest way to boot from my flash drive.