resulted in briking the eeePc.

Your EEE is totally inoperable?!

Researched tune2fs and reported on disk state.  All configured correctly, and working as expected.

Notes:
When I went to do the last edit to the grub, it had reverted to the original line. Possibly my mistake somewhere in terms of inappropriate boots in the middle of the process.  I had to edit the whole file back to reflect nounionfs_ext3

The best it for me was when I went to merge the partitions and found the size identical to that descried in the wiki - very reasuring.

For reference this successful process was undertaken with a F9 restored machine following wiki to the letter step by step

Thanks to all who have worked to develop this resource.

HC

Feel free to update the wiki to clarify things that are unclear.
I've written down all steps as I performed them, but it might be that I took things for granted which are probably not for others, as I have a fair amount of unix knowledge.

The only issues where it can go wrong is if you boot from your old ramfs image, not from the new one, then do the merge. (e.g. if you did not change the grub line, or did not copy properly etc).

I've found that sometimes changes will be dangling in internal buffers. That is why I recommend to explicitly umount and wait at least 30 seconds!

eFfeM wrote:

Feel free to update the wiki to clarify things that are unclear.
I've written down all steps as I performed them, but it might be that I took things for granted which are probably not for others, as I have a fair amount of unix knowledge.

Many thanks to the people who have contributed to this thread. I've tried to collect all this wisdom together into a single shell script, so all you need to do now is:

* Install Puppy Linux on a USB stick - flash Puppy
* Boot your eee using your flash Puppy
* Download the eeepc.sh script onto your eee and run it from the console, like this:

$ wget http://www.mealldubh.org/wp-content/stuff/eeepc.sh
$ chmod u+x eeepc.sh
$ bash eeepc.sh

This should do everything - copy over all your user settings and data, convert to ext3, etc. etc. However, use it at your own risk - don't run it if you can't restore your factory image from DVD etc., and please back up any important stuff off-line.

Suggestions for improvement welcomed!

Many many thanks jpmcc for the shell script. Just used it and can confirm it worked !

Had to download the script first to a usb stick because network was not recognised in Puppy linux.

Is it possible to update the wiki ?

I made new nounionfs initramfs images available. The difference between these and the previous ones is that there are entries in /dev for sdb, sdb1, sdb2, sdb3, sdb4, sdc, sdc1, sdc2, sdc3, sdc4 and that there is an additional boot parameter called SLEEP. This one takes an integer value. If used it will result in a sleep of the specified number of seconds. This is useful if you want to boot the 2GB kernel from USB or SD. They can be downloaded from www.eeepc.speedlinq.nl

Enjoy! FM

very nice guys...used jpmcc's script through puppy linux....worked like a charm! Thank you.

evilgenius wrote:

I am new to linux, so I am not if this is possible. Is there away to remove the unionfs and at the same time make an sdhc card act as a partition? or is there a way to do that after? I would like to write applications, etc. onto a sdhc, nd rarely use the stock ssd. Any help would be appreciated.

If you remove unionfs then after that it should be possible to modify things to mount your sd card to /home.
I guess I would just leave the card in permanently and create a symlink from /home or /home/user to your SD card.

jpmcc wrote:

This should do everything - copy over all your user settings and data, convert to ext3, etc. etc. However, use it at your own risk - don't run it if you can't restore your factory image from DVD etc., and please back up any important stuff off-line.

Suggestions for improvement welcomed!

Hi, I tried the script, but I got nasty errors at the end & the result was a bricked Eeepc.  I think the problem is that the script copies over files into the mounted SSD drive as part of the process, but if the drive is nearly full (which it was in my case), then it falls over???  Anyway, I saved the error messages to my externally mounted usb hard drive.

At the moment, I'm restoring (via puppy linux ) a full backup I made a couple of weeks ago [via http://wiki.eeeuser.com/backup_restore instructions], so I should be up & running soon. 

It might be an idea to mod the script so that line 65:

work_dir=`mktemp -d`

...can somehow optionally mount any external hard drive instead of saving stuff to the SSD???

Note: I've no idea if the above is the cause of the failure, just my observations.  I'll pastebin the error messages I got when I get the chance later today.

Cheers,

Dez.

jpmcc wrote:

zedkatuf: thanks, the error messages would be helpful.

John

http://pastebin.ca/912601

...it was only a partial copy/paste of the errors because I couldn't drag the mouse up & copy more than a screenful in one go.

As I mention in the pastebin comments, the /mnt-system partition became full pretty soon after the script started - probably because I had alot of stuff on the partition in the first place.

Cheers,

Dez.

  re cheap EeePC's - shouldn't be long now, what with all the competition mushrooming up

I suppose I could hack your script to create the temporary directory onto my USB hard drive - I'd just have to 'hard-wire' the code to point  to the correct path, and that should do the trick I guess.

I successfully restored my EeePC using the wiki method, so I'm back with unionfs for the moment.

I was  amazed by the amount of space released, so am keen to give it another try soon

Cheers,

Dez.

Other options to back up or restore
http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/

I have been using it for years on my desktop and laptop, and now with the eeepc, I did use it already to restore my eeepc when I was messing around with it and trashed something.  I can't leave anything alone so this live cloning cd has allowed me to do that.

Thanx Gadgetguy, Kibobo and others.

I red the whole tutorial, drank lots of thee , but after several hours succeeded in removing the unionFS filesystem from my EeePC.

The FaunOS-usb-stick worked fine as well.

Ciao,
Swangdoodles

Last edited by swangdoodles (2008-06-22 5:40:56 pm)