Don't Insult the Man with the Rope

So, I have a first-generation netbook (literally, it’s the EeePC 701 - 2G Surf). For those of you who are unaware, the 2G stands for the size of the internal SSD hard drive — 2 gigabytes. And for the uninitiated, that is frakkin NOTHING nowadays.

Being the Geek that I am, I couldn’t STAND the standard OS. Don’t get me wrong, Xandros was (and is) a nice Linux-based operating system, but I just couldn’t stand the lack of updates, lack of functionality, lack of… well, just about everything. So, I wiped the hard drive, bought myself an 8GB SDHC card, and went to town installing Easy Peasy (an EeePC-centric version of Ubuntu, my OS of choice).

Fast forward to earlier this week. I came to the realization that despite having the OS on the SD card being nice, I was limiting the usefulness of the netbook by having that slot populated all day, every day. I did some research and discovered a way to populate an unused USB header inside the netbook with a stripped down USB flash drive. Hooray for me! 5 hours of soldering later… I had myself a new, 8GB internal hard drive.

Or so I thought.

Instead, I was treated the knowledge that the 8GB flash drive I had so painstakingly installed could not handle any file system I was throwing at it. Especially the ones I needed for it to work with Ubuntu (like ext2, ext3, ext4, etc.). It kept throwing the superblock off a frakkin cliff.

Just my luck.

So, here I sit at nearly 10pm, preparing myself for a trip to WalMart to purchase another 8GB flash drive. Hopefully, this one will not say “frak off!” to every filesystem I throw at it. I am truly sick of looking at the innards of the EeePC.

Oh, and I’m sure I’m going to somehow burn down the house with my soldering iron.