Two years ago I purchased an Eee PC 900 with a 16GB SSD and Windows XP. I left Windows XP on it and installed Eeebuntu 3.0. At this point I don’t remember if I installed Base or Standard. The Eeebuntu people became the Aurora OS people, and they have not released a stable OS since Eeebuntu 3.0.

Eeebuntu 3.0 is based on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04, and support for Jaunty recently ended, so I will not be able to get security updates for it. To top it off, Google Chrome realized this, and has been complaining to me that my operating system is obsolete.

Windows XP itself is a bit old, and I don’t use it anyway. I decided to wipe out the entire hard drive and install a new operating system. I picked Xubuntu to try out first. I downloaded the Xubuntu ISO and used Ubuntu’s Startup Disk Creator tool to put it on a usb stick.

Backing up

I booted Xubuntu and used the command line to backup using an external hard drive with enough free space for a 16GB image of the entire Eee PC disk.

First, identify the name of the hard drive:

sudo fdisk -l

Then I ran the following command to backup the hard drive:

time sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/ubuntu-backup/home/bobby/eeepcharddisk-20110620.dd
31522176+0 records in
31522176+0 records out
16139354112 bytes (16 GB) copied, 642.54 s, 25.1 MB/s

real    10m43.059s
user    0m40.083s
sys     5m36.741s

Installing Xubuntu

I used the shortcut on the desktop to start the installation.