[Dave94LX]

ok, as a few of you may know, I bought an Asus EeePC 900 recently. It came stock with 900Mhz processor, 1GB RAM, and 16GB SSD. I have since upgraded to 2GB RAM, and slapped a 32GB SDHC card in the SD slot. The problem that I have run into is that the SSD that came with this computer is very slow. Most of the complaints about this computer are related to the slow SSD speed.

Soooo... I found a PCIe CF adapter for cheap on eBay, which I decided to pick up. I also purchased a 16GB CF card. I used Acronia True Image to copy the contents of the SSD over to the CF card, which seems to have worked. When I swapped the CF card in though, I get an error. It will not boot off the CF card for some reason. I have seen a few tricks online requiring to load Linux, and then load XP over top of it, but I do not want to do that. I would like to use the imaged copy of XP that is on the CF card if at all possible.

Anyone have any knowledge of this?

 

[nezwick]

This one's beyond me. I think that getting Windows to boot from a CF card is about the same as getting it to boot from a USB stick.

Micro$haft did not design Windows to be run on anything but a HDD, so the way it handles reads/writes is definitely not optimised for flash memory.

Have you tried looking on a EEE forum? If I have time later tonight, I'll look around on my AspireOne forum to see if anybody on there has any tips. I'm sure it's been attempted in an A1 before.

I wonder if you can just install Grub (Linux bootloader) on your CF card and then point it to your Windows installation.

What is the error message saying?

 

[Dave94LX]

One site I found said that you have to change the CF drive from removable to fixed, since windows doesn't like booting from a removable device.

As you mentioned, someone mentioned installing Linux and then XP over top of it. The bootloader was the exact reason why they did that. I wonder if I could install just the linux bootloader?

As for the message, it says something like "unable to boot from the current device. Please switch to a bootable device".

I'll check the Eee site today to see if I find anything.

Thanks for the help Nezwick!

 

[Onegimp]

I know at work we make USB flash memory sticks bootable all the time.
I think it is an HP program we use.
Works great for flashing bio.
I've seen systems boot to windows on compat flash crads

 

[nezwick]

^ Yeah I have that tool too. I didn't even think of it.

It's definitely something you can try. Give me a sec and I'll post a link of where you can download it. If it's not publicly available, you can get it from my server.

 

[nezwick]

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197

I don't think you can use a DOS boot disk to boot XP though. It won't hurt to try.

 

[Dave94LX]

hehehe, thanks guys! I will try it tonight when I get home!

If you guys search on youtube, there are videos of people booting off of CF cards, and they boot FAST! My SSD seems like a dog, and rather than spend $$$ on Super Talent or RunCore SSD, I figured I would try this route. I have about $40 invested in the 16GB CF card and PCIe adapter, so it's worth a shot.