I've been following the progress of ROS for quite some time now and never had the chance to give it a try until lately when I dug up my old Asus EEE PC 701 Here are the spec of the machine itself:
Asus 701 ACPI Bios Revision 0910
Intel Celeron M 900mhz running at 600mhz (as default setting of the machine)
Updated to 2 gb ram
Stock 4gb internal Siliconmotion harddrive
Added a 64 gb SD card for additionnal storage.
Used a usb stick to install (I know now of the bug which I've been able to overcome I'll explain how soon) and ran into a few problem. I'll try to describe some of those, and provide how I've been able to work around them.
First of all this crappy old netbook used to run Lubuntu at a "whooping" crappy slow turtle crawling speed so I was more then happy to try something new on it. Using a Macbook Pro as my main computer, I decided to use it to try ReactOS. To say the least It's been quite a ride to get it to boot, still have some stuff to iron out (mostly drivers) but so far I'm more then impressed by the speed of the machine at this point.
Like I said previously, since that netbook as no cdrom, and the HDD is not removable, I had to use a usb stick to install it on this machine. At first I struggle with the BSOD 0x0000007B both with the liveCD image and the install one. Tried them in a VirtualBox and both worked fine. After a lot of search and head scratching, bios setting change, usb key and port on the machine, despair, several booze bottle later, I've been able to find this russian site, providing a modified version of the 0.4.7.2 iso with better USB support. Here is the link for it: http://vgal.ru.com/reactos-0-4-7-2-new-usb/, like I said it's in russian but google translate did a marvelous job for it.
Needless to say that after several hours of frustration, I was ecstatic to see and complete the first part of the setup, until I hit the wall again, upon the first reboot I've received a message saying opening hive file failed....
..... Until I remember a bad experience I had in the past while attempting to rebuild a Windows setup I had to troubleshoot... I decided to take a look at the loader file:Code: Select all
freeldr.ini:
[ReactOS]
BootType=Windows2003
SystemPath=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\ReactOS
That part was processed without a hitch, and before I knew it, I was greeted by the ReactOS desktop, asking me to configure a few system devices, which I will tackle and provided more details in a separate post as it will be more specific to that netbook model.
But to resume the purpose of that post, it is possible with some elbow grease to achieve an installation on a computer using a USB stick at this point. Feel free to drop a comment if you have further question on my process or if you think I need to add more details.
