AA1 150 10" SATA SSD Question

All the questions relating to replacing a HDD with SDD that I have found so far date from last summer, before the 10" models were available.

Is it practical (not possible -- almost anything is possible, if you're willing to void your warranty) to replace the 160gb SATA HDD an AA1 150 with a SATA SDD of comparable physical dimensions? It is my understanding that on the newer 10" models, there is an access port to the disk drive on the bottom of the machine.

I'm trying to decide if partioning the HDD is better for running Windows and Linux, or if I should just keep the 160gb HDD formatted for Windows, and swap drives when I want to use Linux (which would be most of the time). If this is possible, are there any recommendations for specific SATA SDD replacements?

My netbook travels a lot on a motorcycle, so shock resistance is an important factor.

 

I do know that with my D150-1920 10.1 inch I can install an OS on an SDHC card and boot from it and it does not matter if the HD has been removed or not.

 

That's the other option I'm considering. A bootable 16 mb SD card would do the trick, as I currently have 8gb free on the SDD of my old AA1. It's hard to believe that a fast SD memory card wouldn't be at least as fast as the built-in 16mb SDD in my old AA1. I can't test this on the old machine because the keyboard connector is broken, so I have no way of pressing F2 or F12 during the boot sequence.

Would the following work? Boot from a backup/restore USB flash drive (which I already have) and restore to a mounted SD card, thus making the SD card a boot device. Seems like it would, ignoring the internal HDD. Then, presumably in the future, if I interrupted the boot process with F2 or F12, I could pick whether to boot from the HDD or the from SD card.

 

Inconclusive results so far. I have a 2gb USB flash drive on which I created a "recovery disk" from the optical disc that came with my AA1 (using an external optical drive). I restored its contents to an 8gb SD memory card on an AA1 150. According to the restore software, the process was successful and ended normally. However, when attempting to boot from the SD card, a blue Acer splash screen appears, but nothing else happens. The "Padlock" light above the keyboard flashes, but the disk activity light does not. After 5 minutes of waiting, no boot. I tried this three times before giving up.

I don't want to buy the AA1 150 if I'm going to be stuck with Windows only. Ideally, I'd like to be able to boot from a 16gb SD card or the HDD, but my experiment with an 8gb card isn't encouraging. I have found a Patriot 32gb SATA 2.5 form factor SDD for a reasonable price, but I'm reluctant to buy it and the computer without assurance that I can actually install Linpus on it and boot the thing. I have a full backup USB made with aa1backup (from Macles*) which I have used to do a restore on my old AA1 110, so I know it's good. However, I'm reluctant to use it on a demo machine at a dealer because it looks like it just restores automatically to the HDD, without offering any choices.

So far, I haven't seen anything from Acer suggesting that they sell the AA1 150 in the USA with Linpus pre-installed. Has anybody actually succeeded in installing Linpus from an AA1 110 on an AA1 150? Am I overlooking some small, but critical step?

 

I am a little confused. You say the F-2 and F-12 keys don't work but you booted from a 2Gb USB to install to an 8Gb SD card. I don't understand how you did that but I'm not sure it makes any difference. You said the you tried to boot from the SD card and got a blue splash screen and nothing else. When you tried to boot from the 8Gb SD card were you using an 8.9 inch AA1? If so they wont boot from an SD card unless it is in a USB card reader and then you would need to use the F-2 or F-12 key to tell the computer to boot from the SD card.

Is there any special reason you want to use Linpus?