Ivan Villareal

I got this new mini 110, it came with Windows 7 Starter, and after a day of using it I was very frustrated because it was very limiting, for example, I was unable to change my Desktop background, the network management is confusing and frustrating, and it had a lot of crapware, except for the hp games, that some of them are fun.

Anyway, right now I don’t have time to spend getting a new OS on this machine, I just want something that works, I don’t plan using this to work, but I would like to have some of the tools I use into this.

So my options were, trying Ubuntu remix or Windows Xp, after checking that hp had the drivers for XP, I was going to change Windows 7 to Xp, but I was reading how to create a USB boot drive, and it was too much hassle for me. (I’m very lazy for any Microsoft stuff).

My next option was Ubuntu remix, I’m not a big fan of Ubuntu, but I wanted something to just worked out of the box, also this little netbook comes with splashtop, a really nice feature for checking stuff online fast, and I didn’t want to loose this so I really didn’t knew how well this was going to work.

I started downloading Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic yesterday night, just in case, Today after more frustrating things, I decided to give Karmic a try.

I grabbed my usb pendrive, a 1gb  kingston traveler, mounted the iso and ran usbinst.exe, it was pretty straightforward, my only advice to you would be to avoid saving space for your documents in the usb, my first try I set this to 30Mb and the boot failed, so I set the do not save feature.

It took about 40 minutes to finish copying the files, after it was done, I restarted the netbook with the pendrive connected, and at the first boot screen I pressed F9 key for booting options, selected the pendrive and that was it.

After testing ubuntu from the pendrive, it ran pretty well and everything but the wifi worked, I did an installation, keeping the windows partition and the hp restore partition, just in case.

The installation was pretty smooth, no issues at all, after the first boot I just installed the broadcom drivers, it was pretty easy with the driver manager in ubuntu, and the wifi was working

Update: My hp mini was stolen by a couple of elderly people, I saw the video , so I’m unable to play more with this, but the time I had this I was very happy with it, it performed well.

I’ve got in my hands a Panasonic Toughbook CF-51 and I didn’t went to work because of thanks giving day, so I was there waiting with this laptop and a little spare time, so to kill some time I’ve decided to disassemble the laptop and put it back together.

This are not instructions on how to take apart your laptop, this is only my experience and what I’ve learned, so here I go.

The first thing I did, was to remove the battery, and the cd, for the battery, I had to use a small screwdriver to pop the cover. Then I removed all the bottom screws, there were 13:

To remove the keyboard first I had to pop the frontal speakers cover, I’ve inserted a screwdriver beneath the lcd base, and carefully pull the cover:

Once the speakers cover was removed I’ve carefully picked up the keyboard to found that it is attached near the touchpad, it has a little white clip, that you need to pop in order to remove the cable.

After removing the keyboard, I had to remove the screen to acces the main board, to do this there are 4 screws that support the screen, there are 2 on each side:

After you remove the 4 screws you can move the screen but It has to be unplugged from the main board, and the connectors were located under the speakers, so I have to remove 7 more screws to have access to the lcd connectors:

Before removing the speakers and the touchpad section I had to unplug them, the connectors are located near the keyboard connector:

Here is the top cover removed:

From this point the only tricky part was finding 2 screws that are at the bottom of the lcd base, covered with a sticker:

I continued removing parts but there wasn’t any other tricky part, here are some more pics:

About 2 years ago I purchased this 500Gb Acomdata drive that was on sale at Fry’s, it was a good deal back then, cost me about 100 bucks, it had an aluminium case and a power off switch, and I was in the need to expand the storage capacity of my multimedia server, which is linux based.

I didn’t researched this product, I didn’t even knew that acomdata was a brand, anyway I remember seeing the “Hybrid Drive” statement, but didn’t care, I was going to wipe this drive an reformat it as ext3, so I was aware that all the “software features” it had were useless to me, like the PushButton™ Backup and the Nomad Mobile Desktop.

After I arrived home, I plugged this thing on my server, which had ivman and a custom script to mount anything, but after few seconds nothing happened, I look at the kernel messages and I started to worry, It showed as a CD drive instead of a Mass Storage Device, I tried unsuccessfully to mount this manually, so I thought this drive must be bad.

The next day I connected this drive to a Windows XP, and after some drivers install, it was working, I noticed that it created a virtual CD drive on Windows it had some software on it, so I thought that this was some kind of partition that would be erased after I formatted the drive, so I did this, but the partition was still there.

I did some research on the internet but didn’t found anything use full, so I was again trying to make this stupid drive worked on linux, I hate when I have to fight with the stuff I buy just to make it work on linux, I was very annoyed by this, finally after looking the kernel messages I’ve found that the drive was acting as a SCSI device, so I activated “Probe all LUNs on each SCSI device” in the kernel and after a kernel restart both partitions were available on Linux, however this still had a problem, because I was using ivman to detect the drive and mounted, ivman  didn’t worked for hard drive partition, just for the virtual CD, I’ve tried unsuccessfully to delete that stupid CD partition on windows and Linux.

I had enough of this and I was going to take this drive back to the store, but in a desperation moment I took my screwdriver and started to tearing apart the drive, I wasn’t even stopped by the warranty void seal, my intention was to take the drive format it and put it back without the cd part, I did this, and the format was successful, the drive was totally empty, but when I put this back to the enclosure the stupid CD partition was there, empty this time, but it was there, so it was a firmware issue and I didn’t found a firmware upgrade to remove this stupid feature.

I did some scripts to detect this unmounted the CD part and mount the hard drive partition, it took me about a week to have this thing working the way I wanted,  this was  unbelievable, why they don’t put the software to remove this “hybryd feature”.

However this drive has been working fine, with the virtual CD partition still there until Yesterday, I was in the need to transfer some large files from work to home, and this was the drive more reachable from all the drives I have, so I bring it her to the office, and as soon as I plugged in the CD partition appeared on my Desktop, so I thought it has been a while now, lets see if I can finally reflash the firmware to remove this so called feature, and I’ve found a forum with several users trying to remove this, and suddenly I’ve found this  post:

You need this software from http://www.mediafire.com/?bgwuwq5xzbm

unzip and click on MP251MFG, click on “configure hdd” and once it says pass just unplug and plug in the device. CD PART gone. 

I quickly downloaded the file in question, it was a zip file called “REMOVE CD PART.zip” with about 1.5Mb in size, it has  a Readme.pdf that describes the MP251MFG program, I booted up in Windows, installed the fsdriver because this drive was an ext3, plugged the drive and run the MP251MFG.exe application this is what I saw:

I didn’t backed up the drive, I was just exploring the options and I clicked the Configure HDD, a process was started and finished successfully, I was affraid that my data were gone, so I headed to check if the data was there, and it was, I copied the important stuff somewhere else, unplugged the drive and plugged back in, and voilà, the CD partition was gone along with the data in the drive, but that din’t matter the CD partition was really gone

The drive was reformatted to FAT32, so I reformatted back to ext3, and now it is working pretty well, 2 years later.

I’ve found that this program works for other drives too, here are some links where this program can be found

For Windows:

• xSil251 Switch HDD to CD+HDD_Nomad Mobile Desktop_V1.04_091007
• xSil251 Switch CD+HDD to HDD 3.5_Toshiba_V1.02_041307 

For Macintosh:

• Switch to CD+Secure Nomad for Mac
• CD to HDD Convertor for Mac