Intro: I got a old EEE PC 900 (yeaaaaah!)

What will I use this old machine for? Retro-gaming. Actually, it was harder than expected. Two things drove me mad;

• First: making this cute little machine boot from the internal flash storage or the removable flash storage (which I believe is a IDE SSD with M-PCI connector)
• Second: finding or learning hot to create a 'No-CD' patches for old games.

Specs:

• 900MHZ,
• 1GB DDR2 memory (upgrade to 2GB DDR2)
• 4GB Flash non-removable storage
• 8GB mPCI FLASH removable (IDE SSD storage?)
• Windows XP

First impression and Won't boot anymore (oepsy)

It's so tiny, cool and still complete. Then I opened the box a almost new laptop appeared. It booted without any problem to Windows XP. It felt quick and responsive. Way more than I somehow expected for a device this small and this old. But my happy Windows XP use was for a short period of time.

In my attempted to make a system backup of the internal 8GB removable flash storage (wow!); I placed it in an external HDD/SSD usb case. I connected it to my Windows machine and ... Nothing. The Disk Manager in Windows asked if it was MBR or GPT. Of course I didn't want to change any of the original files on the disk because it contains Windows XP with the drivers. So I disconnected the drive and thought nothing had changed. By now we live in 2024 and I was not sure if all the drivers where still available; So making a backup of at least the drivers is mandatory before changing the operating system.

I didn't select any of the provided options and places the small SSD back in the EEE PC. In my believe nothing has changed. But Windows was unable to start. It kept saying 'Please porvide valid boot option'. I checked the bios and the boot menu. All was correct. It seems that without selecting anything my modern PC has changed something on the SSD for that breave moment it was connected (thank you windows 10!).

What was the problem? So far I didn't know the EEE PC 900 had in some versions two FLASH storage modules. One soldered on the mainboard (4GB) and a replaceable 8GB with a Mini PCI-e connector. Probably an IDE / SCSI variant (at least not SATA).

This fixed it for me:

Upgrade BIOS

• Downloading the bios with the official ROM from the ASUS website, luckily still available.
• Installing the ROM by creating a FAT16 (yes not 32) USB-stick and placed the file on in with the name BIOS.ROM (and a copy 900.ROM, just in case)
• During boot pressing ALT + F2 rapidly; a screen to flash the BIOS appears and tries to scan for connected USB-sticks

  Installing Windows XP

• Don't spend hours / days on trying to boot from the internal FLASH (4GB) or removable FLASH (8GB): I tried Windows, Linux, Official EEE PC Support DVD. Even tried to fix the boot files manually in the command windows, tried to use Hiren's Boot CD (old version).. Really everything. All Operation Systems install fine without any problems but booting didn't work. I tried every BIOS setting. Maybe a solution would be to install GRUB or other boot system on a SD-card and point to the files on the Flash Storage. But this is not what I needed; I wanted to use the SD-card slot in the future like to add new software on the machine (CD-ROM iso's, drivers or game installers, etc.).
• Buy a card-adapter / MSATA converter that allows to connect a mSATA SSD to a Mini PCI Express: Searching on Aliexpress or Amazon gives you many options
• Buy a mSATA SSD (I bought a 128GB model, which Is large enough to install Windows XP and all my owned games).
• After replacing (if you had one) the removable Flash storage with the new adapter and SSD, the old flash storage disappears as an option in the BIOS (yeaaaah!)
• Make a Windows XP USB-stick or burn a CD-ROM. Please use SP3 (or install the SATA drivers yourself); Archive.org is your friend or just like me; use the old CD's that you still have laying around under some dust. With RUFUS (open source tool), you can easily make a boot-able Windows XP usb stick that works on your EEE PC
• Place the USB-stick in your EEE PC; press ESC during boot and a boot menu appears; select your USB stick. Or in my case the external USB-CD rom player.
• During installation it reboots some times; but automatically continues booting from the correct boot source and continues with installing Windows XP; if not, check your boot settings in the bios.

After installing everything should work - Happy Windows XP times!