Not much has happened

Not too much has happened since the last post - my Eee simply works as it should.

The RunCore SSD I won is working wonderfully - from a subjective point of view it serves up files faster, and it consumes less power while doing it as well. For now it works as my repository of movies while I'm at work, but Really Soon Now™ I'll try to put a WinXP install on it - hopefully it'll be somewhat faster than the USB stick I'm currently running WinXP from.

The other piece of news is that I've updated from PupEee 4.2 to the 4.3 Beta - not much have changed apart from the connection manager, and that works much, much better than it used to. It also seems to boot somewhat faster, but I have no hard numbers to back that up. Next step will be to install an up to date FireFox on it and I'm set.

Shuffling OSs...

Having discovered that

a) I like Breezy, but not to the point of replacing my tweaked Xandros Easy Mode
b) I don't use WinXP on my Eee all that much... or even at all
c) Part of the reason I like Breeezy is that it's snappy, running in RAM
d) Part of the reason I don't use WinXP is that it's slooow running of a class 2 SD card

I decided to do the only "logical" thing; move WinXP to the faster Cruzer USB stick, move Breezy to the SD card and hopefully not break too many things in the process.

This was going to be a case of musical chairs with OSs and USB sticks... I'll move WinXP from the SD card to my TwinMOS USB stick, then move Breezy from my Cruzer to the SD card and then finally move WinXP from the TwinMOS to the Cruzer.

Before even starting I had prepared both the sticks on my desktop with the Hitachi Microdrive Filter Drivers to make them bootable.

Step zero was - as always - to make a backup. As usuall, I strongly recomend eeeBackup - it simply works. While I didn't need it this time around, I still wouldn't done without... better safe than sorry


First thing to do was to boot up my Eee, plug in the SD card, the Cruzer and the TwinMOS and make a note of what drive paths each is assigned by Xandros.

- /dev/sdb1 is my SDcard - with WinXP
- /dev/sdc1 is my Cruzer - with Breeezy
- /dev/sdd1 is my TwinMOS - empty


My next step was to unmount them all! Using the command "sudo umount" three times took care of that problem with ease.


Time for GParted to do it's magic. Based on what I did when I first installed WinXP to the SD card, I knew my life would be simpler if all the partitions were the same size. The nice thing is that GParted runs nicely under Xandros, so I simply fired it up and got to work.


The SD card (sdb) was the smallest at 1898Mb, so I told GParted to reduce my Cruzer (sdc) and TwinMOS (sdd) to the same size. And off course, since everything had gone so well up to this point, things didnt go so well... The Cruzer didn't want to be reduced in size - the otherwise excelent software don't like Fat16 partitions, and thats excatly what I had onthe Cruzer.


Nil desperandium... after all, Breezy is made to be portable and easy to install - so I decided to press on with moving the WinXP installation. Opening a new session in my consolle, I used "sudo fdisk -l" to reverify which disk was disk, and then took the plunge with "sudo dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sdd1", followed by "sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1"


Now, if you know Linux command better than I do, you will realise that this copied everything - kitchen sink and all - from the SD card to my TwinMOS card, thus getting one third of the way along. Next move was simple - after I realised that the only 'tweaks' I had made to my Breeezy install was adding AdBlock to FireFox - was to resize the TwinMOS to fit the Cruzer, and then simply do "sudo dd if=/dev/sdd1 of=/dev/sdc1", followed by "sudo dd if=/dev/sdd of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1"


More than halfway there - all that was left was to format the SD card and the TwinMOS to clean up, and install Breeezy on the SD card as outlined in one of my previous posts. Mission accomplised - the card boots Breeezy like a dream, and WinXP boots of the USB stick. I'll time the boot of both later, but WinXP at leasts feels snappier than it did.

Apples and other sorts of apples

I did a quick and dirty comparison of Breeezy and Xandros w/ tweaked Easy Mode, with XP tossed in for shits and giggles.

Boot times were measured by hitting Esc during boot, select the boot device containing the OS in question, and until a working desktop was avilable (ie: disk access stopped). Test was run with my Eee plugged in.
Running time was measured by plugging in a fully charged 5200mAh battery and running it down by continously playing a movie off my external hard drive (a Maxtor Basic 160Gb). Part of logic to run the test of an external hard drive (and use more power), rather than to copy a movie to a SD card or a USB stick was partly lazyness, partly to run the battery down faster (ie: worst case scenario). Volume, brightness etc set at the same levels, WiFi off.

Boot times:
- Breeezy: 45 seconds, booting from a Sandisk cruzer micro 4.0GB (includes connecting to the WiFi)
- Xandros: 32 seconds, booting from the internal SSD
- XP: 146 seconds, booting of a Kingston 2Gb SD-card, rated at 5MB/s read speed.

Running time:
- Breeezy: 2h20min
- Xandros: 2h25min
- XP: 2h5min

The joy of Windows....

Don't worry - I haven't decided to switch from Xandros to WinXP. I just figured it may be a nice challenge to have an XP install on a SD card in cause I needed it at some point. That, and we all need some self inflicted misery in our life =)

And if / when all else failed, I made sure I had a recent backup of my user partition (courtesy of gfoot's excellent eeeBackup - highly recommended). And not surprisingly, it came in handier than I thought

Reading up a bit, I thought I had the perfect solution for installing directly to an SD card, leaving my tweaked box untouched. Uhm.. no. No matter what trick I tried (granted, given for USB hard drives), I could not make the Windows installer see the SD card as the C-drive. And I wasn't about to trash my boot partition for no gain.

So, the next step were more research; what was needed to get Windows from the SSD to an SD card... and once again I found a workable solution.

I've started with my Eee, my WinXP desktop, a fresh SD (2gb) card, a USB stick, a legal copy of WinXP (in my case, a students edition) and a borrowed USB DVD-reader.

I then download the XP3eSD utility, the Hitachi Microdrive Filter Drivers, and a copy of Partedmagic.

First step should have been to burn and test a LiveCD with Partedmagic...

Following the instructions made life simple - the installation of Windows took longer than I remembered, but then it has been a year or two since I had to reinstall on my desktop. The one thing I made sure of was to installWinXp to a partition slightly smaller than 2Gb - I selected 1900Mb - to make transfer to the SD card easier later. Once WinXP was installed and running I turned of the swap file, system restore and the screen saver. I then loaded theMicrodrive Filter Driver for the SD card, paying close attention to the instructions once again. A quick reboot later to make sure I hadn't screwed things up, I powered down to boot withPartedmagic.

Remember I mentioned I should have tested the LiveCd first?

At any rate, another quick download - this time from PartedMagics homepage - I had a working copy of Partedmagic and could get to work again. I must say it was easier then the arcane commands in the instructions would imply; adjust the partitions to match (in my case, reduce the partition on the SD card with 20Mb), open the terminal and copy the commands carefully.

After the files were transferred, I rebooted again, this time selecting the SD card as the boot device. WinXP was a little slow loading (well, compared to from theSSD - not compared to me desktop) but came up. Putting the Asus Restore DVD in the external DVD, I rebooted from the DVD and restored Xandros. Next reboot was directly from my "USB Backup Stick", using gfoot's excellent and most recommended eeeBackup to restore my user partition. Yet another reboot - this time from the SSD - assured me that my Eee was back at it's own self, running Linux with all my software and tweaks in place.

All that remained was to reboot into WinXP on the SD card (which, for some reason, seemed faster the second time), put the support DVD in the external player and start installing the drivers... which took for ever.

Later, I'll install Firefox (probably 2.0.0.16) with a few add-ons, SpyBot, AdAware and a lightweight anti-virus to make a usable system, and see about hacking bits of WinXP away. For now, I'm satisfied with the fact that I have managed to install WinXp on a removable media and running it on such a tiny box - couldn't have done it without others doing it before me though.

Oh, and I've found a use for it: as a "sand box" environment for letting others borrow my Eee. Supervised, off course =)