Lack of HD Space On Classmate Netbook

[de_]

We have an original (Win XP I believe) Classmate which I believe comes with a 16gb SSD which at some point in time got converted to Win 7. I believe the current partitioning leaves 10gb available and we are constantly out of disk space and we are a year behind on Win 7 updates last I heard as they always fail due to lack of disk space.

Anyone know if the 2011 or 2012 Classmates have more disk space ?

Anyone tried upgrading the drive ? It uses a cable that I have not seen before (might be a LIF CE-ATA interface for 1.8" drives).

Yes we do our development off the classmate but it would be nice to have the environment there just in case.

[Mark McLeod]

There is an SD card slot on the 2010 Classmate that can be used for expanded storage.
There was a special procedure when upgrading to Win 7 that preserved more disk space. Without it it Classmate would be left with only MB of available disk.

The 2011 Classmate has a traditional 160GB hard disk, but any laptop/netbook can be used as the Driver Station machine.
We also use an HP Pavilion netbook.

[Tom Line]

The procedure Mark is talking about is removing the installation line from the reimaging .ini file that is responsible for creating the recovery partition. In fact, for teams with a 2009 classmate, this may be necessary this year to install the necessary software to run the Kinect. We had to do so to make everything fit.

By removing the recovery partition during reimaging, then updating fully, and installing all the necessary Beta software, we were left with a little under 2 GB of space.

Of course, you shouldn't be installing the entire Labview development suite on the classmate - that will take quite a bit of extra room.

[Mark McLeod]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

...for teams with a 2009 classmate, ...

2010 Classmate
There was no 2009 Classmate for FRC.

[Mr. Lim]

I'm in the midst of reimaging a 2010 and am running into the same issue. I'm about to delete the recovery partition and resize the Windows partition.

Anyone have any suggestions on the best way to do this?

I happen to have a Hiren's Boot CD installed on the USB key I carry around with me, but that seems to be a bit of a roundabout way.

Anyone care to share their insight?

[Mark McLeod]

Classmate Drive Space Recovery Procedure
Classmate Drive Space Installation Files

and if you're reinstalling Win 7 don't forget
Windows 7 Activation
Windows 7 Activation Files

[Mr. Lim]

Thanks for the links Mark.

We've already finished the imaging process, and removed a lot of the non-essential stuff, and installed our development suite.

I was hoping someone had a different procedure other that FIRST's, as theirs required reimaging the driver station again.

If anyone is curious however, deleting the recovery partition, moving the 100MB System partition to the beginning of the drive, and then resizing the Windows partition using a utility like gParted, or any of the various partitioning utils on Hiren's BootCD *does* work - provided you boot off a Win7 recovery CD (err USB rather...) afterwards, and let the automatic startup diagnostic tool update your boot BCD entries.

If you don't do that last step, your Classmate will repeatedly restart itself when trying to boot.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Mr. Lim

Thanks for the links Mark.

We've already finished the imaging process, and removed a lot of the non-essential stuff, and installed our development suite.

I was hoping someone had a different procedure other that FIRST's, as theirs required reimaging the driver station again.

If anyone is curious however, deleting the recovery partition, moving the 100MB System partition to the beginning of the drive, and then resizing the Windows partition using a utility like gParted, or any of the various partitioning utils on Hiren's BootCD *does* work - provided you boot off a Win7 recovery CD (err USB rather...) afterwards, and let the automatic startup diagnostic tool update your boot BCD entries.

If you don't do that last step, your Classmate will repeatedly restart itself when trying to boot.

*chuckle*. Ours does that, and many other interest things even after repeated images. It also continually runs out of memory (ram). I'm beginning to suspect a defective ram stick..... but we're relegating it to backup status after beta test because the thing is just too slow and annoying.

[de_]

fyi: We replaced our 16gb SSD (stock on 2009 Classmate), with a 1.8" pata LIF 120gb drive (off Ebay) which appears to have worked fine. Not sure how much speed we might have lost going from SSD (2008 speeds) to a 3600RPM HD but for a driver station, it should be easily fine. 120GB might seem like overkill but it was cheaper in our case than a 60gb after shipping and was based on modern drive technology. No 2.5" drives don't fit and don't have the LIF pata ribbon cable interface. Watch out for sata LIF drives which will not work in the Classmate. Needs to be pata ide.

[acastagna]

Does anyone know if there is a process to allow an SD card to be treated as hard-drive space?

The classmate recognizes the card and allows us to read/write files to the card, but we cannot use it for installation of this years upgrades. We get the same memory problems as before, and the procedure to changing the recovery partition hasn't worked for us.