BIOS
First update your Bios to the latest version. I don’t know of any known problems if you don’t. But I did update bios before installing, better safe than sorry. I found that the current latest BIOS for Asus Eee 901 was 2103, found here.
Come one Asus…your site, sitemap, search and navigation are rubbish, confusing and slow.
Unzip the downloaded bios, put the “901-ASUS-2103.ROM” file (or whatever newer version) on a usb drive and rename it to “901.ROM”. With the power of, put the usb stick in the Eee and power on. Press ALT+F2. This will start the bios update, searching for .ROM-files on any usb drive since Eee doesn’t have any cdrom or floppy disk.
If problems reading the thumb drive try format it as FAT.
Upgrading bios is risky and could possibly leave your computer in a useless state. Until you get a new bios properly installed.
SSD Memory Card, Replacing the Hard Drive
There is no traditional hard disk in the 901, only a SSD which functions as the hard drive. I don’t fully trust that Windows 7 will be problem free, and quite happy with the Linux installed. Therefore I initially wanted to keep the Linux that were shipped installed on my Eee as I bought it. And replace the existing SSD with a new, keeping the old SSD in a drawer somewhere. This way I will always have a fallback on returning to the old and working operating system just by refit the old “hard drive”. But it seemed to be a bit hazardous to replace, and a bit expensive to buy another SSD, probably just leaving it in the drawer never to use it again.
Therefore plan b was to backup the existing (Xandros) Linux Operating System. But I am not familiar with Linux, and after some googling and blog reading, I gave up. By by Xandros with no safety net .
Shrink Windows 7 (vLite)
This step was probably a bit tedious since my first attempt to install on the 4GB drive wasn’t a big success. Ending up with installing on the other drive, which has 16GB, space is not an issue any way. On the 4GB it installed ok, but left between 180 and 500 MB free. Which made the pc act in strange manners, often with the message “out of memory”. But the step-by-step guide for vLite was found here, http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=57434.
Preparing USB install media
The Asus Eee 901 doesn’t have a cdrom to install from, and since the newly inserted hard drive is empty, I need to prepare a usb media to be my bootable install media. Some blogs warned against using a media larger than 4GB, but my 8GB TDK thumb drive was no problem for me.
This will work from another PC with Vista installed, from XP you will a workaround to see the usb drive. Do the following steps:
Diskpart (from command prompt)
List Disk (in the window that opened in 1)
Select Disk n (Replace n with number reflecting your usb drive)
Clean (remember, this will wipe out any content on the usb drive)
Create Partition Primary
Active
Format fs=fat32 quick
Assign (gives the usb stick a drive letter)
Copy the content of the dvd to the usb media. My version of Windows 7 is a shrinked .iso file, which I unzip to a temporary location and copy from there.
Installing
Start the Asus Eee with the USB media inserted. Press [Esc] repeatedly while the pc is starting. A dialog with the preferred booting device is shown. The first two are the installed SSD-drives. The third one was my usb drive. The windows was starting up. Choose the clean install, not upgrade. I then deleted all partitions on both disk 1 and 2, and formatted both drives. My first attempt to install on the 4GB drive succeeded, but the drive was so full it kept giving me error messages and warnings about the low space available. I repeated this step and installed on the 16GB drive. Where it now runs successfully.
Comments and wishes on this will result in a more step-by-step guide with screen shots.
