Acer Aspire One AOA110L (a.k.a. zg5) - replace SSD with Hard Drive

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

Is there 2 OS's on the SSD or not ?


you could try this

Open a terminal and run:

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sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

and change:-

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#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10

to:-

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GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=2
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=0

SAVE the file and exit gedit.

Back in the terminal run

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sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober

and change (approx line 23):-

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quick_boot="1"

to

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quick_boot="0"

SAVE the file and exit gedit.

Back in the terminal run:

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sudo update-grub

and reboot to test.

[Screagle]

I only have Peppermint six OS on the SSD.  Do I need Grub then or would a MBR suffice?

Having made the changes the GNU GRUB V2.02 menu no longer appears on boot up - thanks!  However as before there is a 17 second delay between the Acer F2 F12 screen and Peppermint start up screen.  When this screen appears there's a message along the top which reads "Keys: Continue to wait, press S for skip mounting or M for Manual recovery" or words to that effect.  Is this Grub related as well?

My Peppermint OS now takes three seconds to shutdown which is a big improvement over the original 16Gb SSD!

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

No you need to have GRUB (or some other bootloader) but if you only have a single OS, GRUB normally hides its menu .. I guess that got messed up somewhere along the line.

Following the instructions in my last posting should hide the GRUB menu again.

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

I'm getting the impression that the hardware just isn't physically capable of using a bluetooth/wireless combo card.

If people are having to go to these lengths to add bluetooth internally:
http://tnkgrl.com/2008/08/14/modding-the-acer-aspire-one-bluetooth/
and
http://joeharper.net/2008/10/02/43/

you can pretty much guarantee it's not going to be as easy as just swapping out the card

[Screagle]

As an update  -  Acer Aspire One (ZG5) compatible Super Talent SSD's all formats now available again with 10% off coupon.

https://www.memoryc.com/storage/ssd/64gb-supertalent-13-inch-idepata-zif-interface-ssd-solid-state-disk-acer-aspire-one-netbook.html

No connection etc.

[Screagle]

As I await the delivery of my second 64GB Super Talent SSD I'd really appreciate some advice on how to migrate Peppermint OS6 and customisations from my other ZG5 SSD to the the 64GB. I boot from POS6 only i.e. not dual booting required. I'm comfortable with swapping the SSD's but want to avoid a complete OS re-install if that is possible.  I started off on the wrong foot last time using DD.  Any thoughts?

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

Have you got an external HDD you can use to write an image to ?

[Screagle]

Alas, I don't have an HDD.  All I have is a 2GB boot memory stick (USB) with POS6 installed and then a 16GB and 32GB memory stick (USB).  I'm looking to migrate from the ZG5 original 16GB SSD to the Super Talent 64GB SSD.

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

Well as you have a USB stick larger than the SSD, here's what I'd do

a) Download the latest Redo Backup & Restore ISO image from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/redobackup/
and place it on your desktop

b) Install syslinux:

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sudo apt-get install syslinux

c) Make the ISO image an isohybrid image:

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isohybrid ~/redobackup-livecd-1.0.4.iso

d) Burn the ISO image to the 16GB USB stick, by (In Peppermint 6) right-clicking the redobackup-livecd-1.0.4.iso file and selecting "Make bootable USB stick" .. then pointing it at the 16GB stick.

e) boot to the 16GB stick .. once booted, also inert the 32GB stick and use Redo to create a full disk image of the SSD saved onto the 32GB stick.

f) swap out the SSD

g) boot back to the 16GB stick and use Redo to restore the backup you wrote to the 32GB stick to the new SSD

h) If necessary (though IIRC you can tell redo to do this on the fly) .. boot to the Peppermint 6 LiveUSB and use GPArted to resize the partitions on the 64GB SSD

did that make sense ?

[Screagle]

Thanks Mark, I'll give it a crack and report back.  When I insert the 64GB SSD at f) do I need to refomat it to ext4?  No need for reply if reformat not needed.

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

There should be no need as the backup should restore the whole filesystem .. that said, it won't hurt if you do and IIRC those SSD's come without a partition table at all so can't hurt

[Screagle]

Re #31 above I found the cause of that message to be an out-of-date UUID in etc/fstab.  When mkswap is run the UUID gets changed which I found out when tying to figure out why fdisk -l was not listing the swap partition (type 82) as such.  As soon as I had updated fstab as well the initramfs config.d file with the correct UUID for the boot time sped up and the message went away.

Finally I used the desktop Disk utility to relabel the swap partition from type 83 (Linux system) to type 82 (Linux swap / Solaris so now fdisk -l lists the partitions correctly even though prior to that swapon -s confirmed it to be a swap partition.

Probably fairly obvious stuff but I've got to learn somehow as well as stop digging holes for myself.  Having said that I now have a super fast, super talented ZG5!

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

Terrific, and well done .. That's what one of the thingsI like about Linux, you can dig around in it to your hearts content learning continuously, it's all just a bunch of readable config files