[rebent]

Somehow I fracked up the SSD on my dell mini that my parents gave me a few years ago. My brother got a new laptop, so I bought his off of him. Trying to increase the performance, I deleted the pagefile.sys, and that destroyed that SSD as well. *sigh*

So now I have two Minis, and no SSDs. What should I do?

I can see three options:

1. buy new SSDs, reinstall, and sell the minis. How much money do you think I could make doing that? Can someone recommend an SSD?

2. sell the husks. They both have upgraded RAM and some sweet stickers on them. Great shape. Anyone want to buy them? How much do you think I could get for them?

3. somehow use a flash drive to boot linux and use that for a media center or something. Is this even worth the effort? I've never used linux before.

Thanks!

[reflex]

You've tried and failed to reinstall Windows on the "failed" SSDs?

1. A new 16GB Mini 9 SSD seems to be $60. A used SSD probably would make it easier to make your money back.

2. I'd say less than $100 per. No warranty, no drive, and no OS kills the value to most people.

3. You can install full Linux on a Flash drive (preferably 8GB, but 4GB would work with discipline). But a Mini 9 can't play HD videos well, so it probably won't make a good media center. It'd probably make a decent "web appliance" though. Like a kitchen web browser, or a HDTV web browser (with a wireless keyboard/mouse).

You could make the Mini 9 into a HD media center if you swapped the WiFi card for a Broadcom Crystal Decoder card. But that costs $50.

[AaronASB]

Originally Posted by rebent

Somehow I fracked up the SSD on my dell mini that my parents gave me a few years ago. My brother got a new laptop, so I bought his off of him. Trying to increase the performance, I deleted the pagefile.sys, and that destroyed that SSD as well. *sigh*

So now I have two Minis, and no SSDs. What should I do?

I can see three options:

1. buy new SSDs, reinstall, and sell the minis. How much money do you think I could make doing that? Can someone recommend an SSD?

2. sell the husks. They both have upgraded RAM and some sweet stickers on them. Great shape. Anyone want to buy them? How much do you think I could get for them?

3. somehow use a flash drive to boot linux and use that for a media center or something. Is this even worth the effort? I've never used linux before.

Thanks!

You can't destroy an ssd by deleting a pagefile. Do some googling im sure you can get it working again.

[rebent]

Well, deleting the page file didn't destroy the ssd..... but yanking the battery because it froze when it was booting did!

[plainnash]

Out of interest, would it be possible to internally install a USB drive into the Mini, then run either 7 or Leopard from this?
I'm looking for a cheap method of getting my Mini 9 back running again, the SSD was dead when I got it.

Cheers for any advice.

[reflex]

Originally Posted by plainnash

Out of interest, would it be possible to internally install a USB drive into the Mini, then run either 7 or Leopard from this?
I'm looking for a cheap method of getting my Mini 9 back running again, the SSD was dead when I got it.

You could solder a USB drive internally. Search the forums for "internal USB", "internal USB hub" or similar. There should be some info.

As for running off it, I don't think Windows likes running off a USB drive, I dunno about OSX. (Linux should run off a USB drive)

[rebent]

Thanks for all the advice everyone! I tried putting linux/google os on a flash drive, but it was just too much of a hassle for me to figure out how to use those OSs. So I decided to sell them instead. You can see the post I am about to make for more info.

-Thanks again!

[dadeo]

Virtually the same situation here:

Dell mini-9 (Inspiron 910) acquired from sister with BIOS and HDD pw locked, (not by her-btw). I was able to get the BIOS unlocked but ssd hdd is still requesting a pw that only Dell can tell me for $60 charge. I suppose that might be a fair price if I wanted the data off of it or if the pw had been set by a user and not by itself. But in this situation it strikes me as a scam by Dell to hit customers for another charge after warranty. But, I've found the mini-9 very useful without the ssd using several versions of Puppy Linux.

Fluppy 13 worked perfectly out of the box for me and Lucid 5.1 worked well with a different wifi driver. The mini-9 seems to have a Broadcom wifi card that doesn't like standard Broadcom drivers.

Puppy runs really fast, directly from RAM, so once loaded you don't suffer from the USB laggy loads like you would running regular live cd distros.

One thing, coming from Windows or even a regular Linux distro, it takes some time to wrap your head around how it works and how to use it. It utilizes a nested file system that essentially gives you dual locations for the same place..see, confusing. Thankfully there is much support, almost too much when coming to find your issue discussed. And even better, it usually has everything you need in it and the common add-ons like Google Chrome, Firefox, GIMP, Pidgin and the rest of the common linux installed programs are easy to find in custom .pet packages or RAM stingy .SFS files to use.

[mcm95403]

I have 2 SSD's for you. One is a barely used (less than an hour) 4 gig with Linux, the other is an 8 gig with XP. Used the 8 gig one for about a month before I bought a 32 gig. These are both factory Dell SSD's.

I'll send both to you ready to go for $25 shipped. PM me if you want them.

[bsiegler]

Bootable USB with Windows 7, yes you can do this to run the full O/S.. Go over to the Dell Mini Hardware issues Forum to see my post.