XP on an Asus Eee's SD card: Epic Fail

For the past couple of weeks I've been battling to install Windows XP to an 8Gb SDHC card on my Eee. I've just given up - I've rebooted so many times and dabbled with so many dark arts in the process and it still doesn't work, so... fsck it.

I only wanted it for two things; Windows Live Writer, the king of all blog editors (seriously, this is something Linux lacks - there just isn't anything that can hold a light to WLW), and Grand Theft Auto 3 (which looks great on the dinky screen). I had a spare license I could use to install it and be legal and, seeing as I was planning on installing Ubuntu on it soon and that XP hoses the contents of the hard drive, I could do the XP thing before getting a proper operating system.

I'm hardly a novice, so things like this should be easy, I thought. Wrong at the first count - XP isn't designed to install onto SDHC cards, so there's a whole load of hacking that has to be done from the outset. Once it's on your Eee, there's some more hacking to be done to make the SDHC card look like a regular hard drive, and then you have to somehow persuade it to leap from the internal drive to the card, and then convince it to boot from it, and it's these last two parts that really push your patience - not least because you have to do all this with the fault-intolerant FAT32 file system (for non-techies, this is the equivalent of a 1960s Yale latch compared to modern door locks) and the whole process is laden with spanner-in-the-works opportunities.

The latest spanner (a carbon-fibre adjustable wrench, fact-fans) in the latest works (taking an image of the internal drive and dumping it onto the SDHC card) is the final straw. I've had enough. Microsoft can extend their XP support for ultra-mobiles for as long as they like, it ain't happening until it works the way I want it. (Speaking of the XP support, they've added so many caveats that it looks like they're insisting on killing the golden goose so that its younger, uglier and less popular sibling gets a whisper of a hint of a chance. Fools.)

So, it's over. My plan to have an XP card are dashed; life is just too damned short. Now to try and install Ubuntu via USB flash drive...