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Boot ASUS EEE PC from External Drive?

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  • Boot ASUS EEE PC from External Drive?

    Ok, this is what's up.

    A friend of mine gave me his tiny Asus EEE PC laptop. The hard drive won't boot at all. The computer turns on and I get this message:

    A disk read error occured
    Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

    Nothing else... only that on the black screen. No windows, nothing, nada. Gotta be HD is dead.

    So this is what I have.

    Puppy Linux bootable CD-ROM, external USB CD Drive.

    Hooked that up, put in CD and hoped the dumb PC would see that.

    No luck.

    Is there a quick fix for this so that at least the PC can boot from the CD ROM and according to Puppy Linux site I can make a USB flash drive start up volume using the other USB port.

    Ideally I would need to take out the HD and put in a new one. I already looked at a video that shows me how to do this, though I may just want to find someone else to do that for me. The computer is nice and small and good if it works to just do simple tasks like word processing and web browsing.

    I also don't want to install Windows on the thing either.

    I'm a Mac guy and this is one of the few PCs I've gotten over time that gave me a problem. As a Mac guy I would think they would have come up with a simple way to boot from another drive (like hold C down on the Mac) other than fooling around with BIOS files that in this case don't even show up since the HD is dead.
    Last edited by mel; May 11, 2014, 09:04 AM.
    I'm still here. Are you?

  • #2
    Re: Boot ASUS EEE PC from External Drive?

    Windows based PC would have something called a BIOS which controls things like what order of boot devices to go through.

    Are there any other messages that appear before these two lines appear?

    A disk read error occured
    Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

    If a company logo appears before these two lines you might want to press the ESC key to see what else appears.

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    • #3
      Re: Boot ASUS EEE PC from External Drive?

      Company logo and nothing else shows up.. just the message. Gotta be the hard drive is dead... or at least disconnected.
      I'm still here. Are you?

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      • #4
        Re: Boot ASUS EEE PC from External Drive?

        I tried looking up EEE on the ASUS web site and I got like about 19 different notebook products. By any chance is there a label on the bottom of the unit saying what the model number is?


        URL to the ASUS web site for notebooks:
        http://www.asus.com/us/Search/?Searc...oks_Ultrabooks

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        • #5
          Re: Boot ASUS EEE PC from External Drive?

          Mel , I have owned several of these computers.

          My favorite always had a big external hard drive hooked up.
          With a solid state drive of 4 gig and subtracting the OS one has about 1.5 gigs storage.
          The base operating system for many of those gadgets was xandros 4.5

          They will boot up from an external dvd/cd device or a usb key.
          Unetbootin will make a bootable flash disk very easy
          As the computer boots quickly press esc key a few times.
          This should hopefully get one to boot options.
          None of this is ironclad but after fiddling with literally thousands of computers I have developed a perspective based on overall statistics.
          If plan A does not work go to Plan B.
          Unfortunately the small drives are very hard to replace.
          If one can , place the device in a clean dry place and wait for new ideas to arise.

          The Asus repositories shut down very early and only savvy users could really
          get them to work properly.

          One of the few packages that always seemed to work was the Opera browser.

          The newest opera will actually play OGV video files in the browser.
          Last edited by lensperson; June 4, 2014, 10:59 PM.

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