This little blerb may help you, and other Netbook owners, in the future. At least that's my hope.
I bought my little Acer Aspire ONE Netbook and ran right home to set it up and install my favorite software packages.
I was horrified when I looked for the CD/DVD drive and found, "there is NONE!". Horror of horrors!
I did find out that I could boot up my little toy computer with a bootable USB drive.
It was definitely time to get Creative. Eh?
So I dug out my "
hard drive to USB adapter", connected a standard CD/DVD burner to one of its IDE ports and also connected the AC/DC power supply (that comes with the adapter) to the drive, plugged in the USB plug to the Netbook and VOILA, I had a CD/DVD drive on my Netbook. What a life saver! I was finally able to install MS Office and other software that comes on CD's.
That adapter also works for IDE hard drives and even SATA II hard drives or CD drives.
It's a real life saver for the Netbook owner.
Sorry, I cannot post a brand name or source for that adapter. Just Google IDE SATA to USB Adapter.
Your search should turn up this Adapter Package. You'll definitely need one with the AC power supply.
I've bought several of these adapters and I've given some away as gifts to my Techie friends.
Good Luck,
PS: One of the first things I did with my little adapter, was to connect an old IDE drive that I had laying around and I booted up with my USB Flash Drive, containing my Ghost Backup program and I did my first backup of my newly set up C: drive.
With a backup '
in the can' so to speak, you can do all sorts of experimenting with your OS. Mess it up, restore your backup and you're right back in business, as if nothing ever happened.
I experimented with loading Windows 7 on my little Netbook, didn't like it at all and restored my Win-XP backup and it was like Win-7 had never been there at all.