2012/08/upgrading-the-ssd-on-an-old-eee-pc-901/

[utterances-bot]

Upgrading the SSD on an old Eee PC 901 - Greg Woods - Occasionally Useful

Problem The Eee PC 901 XP edition comes with a 4Gb SSD for booting Windows, and a slower 8Gb one for storage. To reinstall XP Home with SP3, you will need more than 4Gb unless you want to spend weeks of your life trimming down a custom “XP Lite” installation disc. The 8Gb disc is not installed to be easy to access. I read somewhere it is even soldered onto the motherboard, so replacing this is a no-go. The 4Gb is easily accessible under the “maintenance” cover on the back of the netbook, so this is the solution. A 70mm long SSD was purchased to enable me to screw the card down. Once installed, due to the way the Eee PC’s hard disk interfaces are designed, the new SSD is recognised as a Primary Slave. This has 2 negative effects: 1) You 8Gb secondary SSD now “disappears” from the BIOS, and cannot be used. I can live with this. 2) At every boot, you are interuppted with a message to the effect of “Primary Master not found, Press F1 to continue” - this is a pain in the backside. Fixing it Reading around, it turns out you can enable a feature in the BIOS called Boot Booster. This gets around the HiIt F1 error, and does make bootup a lot faster. Before the option even appears in the BIOS, you need to set up an EFI partition. Below are the steps to do this. Boot GParted, shrink your Windows XP installation partition so that have at least 8Mb free at the end of the disk. I ended up with 39Mb Make this parition ‘Primary’ and unformatted. Note the location of the partition. Mine was /dev/sda2 (disk: /dev/sda. partition: 2) Still in gParted, open a Terminal window sudo sfdisk -change-id /dev/sda 2 [note the space before the ‘2’] check it worked… sudo sfdisk -print-id /dev/sda 2 Reboot, press F2 to access BIOS You should now have a Boot Booster option available References http://forum.eeeuser.com/index/php?/topic/24064-boot-booster-and-sda4-efi-partition/page__st__20

https://gregwoods.github.io/2012/08/upgrading-the-ssd-on-an-old-eee-pc-901/

[GregWoods]

Originally by Neil Hoskins

Surely, should read:
sfdisk –change-id /dev/sda 2 ef
sfdisk –print-id /dev/sda 2

You then get some warning about the extended partition not starting at a cylinder boundary, but it seems to work anyway.

Tried this and now get boot booster option in the BISO, but still get the “hit F1” issue.

[GregWoods]

Sorry, I can’t be any more help. The EeePC has long gone. I just remember that getting the Boot Booster to work made the Hit F1 message go away

[GregWoods]

Originally by INFINITEKIFF

Thanks Greg

Works like a charm!

Thanks Neil Hoskins for your edit about “ef”
I suspect Greg maybe forgot to type that detail, we all make mistakes.
Also thank you Rickou for adding the comment about waiting for second reboot!
I now have Win 7 Pro running beautifully on my asus Eeepc 901, its not even a trimmed down version as you well know the reason we started to get this error message was after an ssd upgrade and couldnt be arsed to change the 4GB one too much hardwork! so just swapped out the 12GB one. Dont you just love Linux?! btw anyone know of a good flavour of linux that will run in a behaved manner on this machine. I used to have saluki running on it but just saluki and nothing else. some suggest bohdi, others suggest tiny core, while still others suggest ubuntu, really ubuntu? how would it fit and operate with a mere 16Gb left to play with? I want to dualboot off the same SSD from /dev/sda2 as I made the efi partition /dev/sda3 after Id already created the 2 partitions for win /dev/sda1 and linux /dev/sda2 respectively? Would I be right in assuming there is a light version of mint that could suit the 901? as in does the light version of mint only need 1 parttion as opposed to 4 like 17.2?
MATE? hapy for any pointers in the right direction, thanks in advance.

[freakedenough]

I could verify that your manual is correct. The F1 error is only present in case you didnt shutdown the device correctly, otherwise it will immiadetly boot to Windows.
I also translated the manual to German.
https://www.retrospace.net/infoseiten/readm.php?id=88