Just recently I’ve restored a DELL MINI 9 with its original installation of Ubuntu (a more user friendly version of Linux). Sadly, it was an utter pain.

First off, Dell don’t make these images freely available. In fact, I don’t think you can even pay to download them – they are simply missing from Dell’s website.

After some thorough research on Google, I came across an image (that I have uploaded) and a utility that puts it on a USB key – if you have a DELL MINI 9, you too will be needing a USB key if you don’t have an external DVD drive.

The files you need are as follows:

• http://www.ideologics.co.uk/downloads/Inspiron_910_Ubuntu_A00.img
• http://www.ideologics.co.uk/downloads/win32diskimager-RELEASE-0.2-r23-win32.zip

Download both of these files. Open the zip file, and install Win32 disk imager. Using this utility, you will be able to write the IMG file to a USB drive.

(This is the only utility that has written the IMG file to a key successfully, others said they had written it but I found that the restore process would fail.)