I have a little eee pc 900 netbook that I somehow installed OpenBSD 6.6 on a few years ago. Recently I thought I’d give Haiku a shot, but the netbook will not boot from anything USB.
I know the BIOS is up to date on the final version 1006. Just to be sure, I reflashed it, from a FAT16 128MB USB drive (by pressing ALT+F2 at boot with the bios file 900.ROM on the stick).
I have tried numerous SMALL USB sticks (2 GB and smaller) with Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core Linux, and Haiku (32bit) and the laptop never sees the sticks: pressing escape during POST brings up the boot device selection menu and it only shows the internal 4GB (not msata, but some weird old Asus thing–so I can’t stick it in another computer) hard drive.
I have tried booting to the BIOS by hitting F2 during POST. The USB drives are never visible in the list of boot devices. I even tried an old USB CD ROM drive and burning Damn Small Linux to CD. The netbook doesn’t see the drive. I tried a spinning hard drive in a USB enclose, nope netbook didn’t see it. Tried a 2GB SD card…not seen either.
I have tested all these prospective USB boot devices in other old (non-EFI) computers and they boot fine.
Yeah, I think it’s your eeePC that’s broken, my eeePC 701 always worked fine in Haiku (although I haven’t tested recently) and I remember seeing a bunch of people reporting that the 900 models worked fine as well, no mention about USB not being recognized.
The fact it doesn’t see any USB device no matter what it is and what’s on it is all the proof you need imo.
But it was able to see the USB device I flashed the BIOS file from…
And I forgot to mention, I can mount USB sticks from Open BSD no problem. I guess it is something to do with the BIOS. Could the dead little watch battery cause this strange problem? (I presume it is dead by now although I have not checked because this is not an easy laptop to take apart.)
Also, some eeePC had some “quirks” where you need to use the usb ports from one side to boot. Those on the other side wouldn´t boot ( but work normally inside Windows ) .
But you said the sdcard was also not recognized. Can you try with a clean usb disk, formatted only with FreeDos ( Rufus or similar ) to see it it then boots ?
Well, the eee pc 900 will not boot from freedos either on CD or USB.
I got another netbook, an Acer Aspire One (AO751h) and it too is a total beast to boot from: nothing worked from USB except Tiny Core Linux but then that would not boot from the internal hard drive after I installed it. I managed to get the plop boot loader installed to the hard drive’s MBR after booting from a tiny core USB, but plop only loads tiny core and freedos. Haiku gets stuck at a black screen and no other lightweight Linux distro or OpenBSD will boot.
I also tried to boot plop from a CD on the eeepc, but it didn’t work either. I think these little netbooks are just too decrepit or have strange BIOS. I doubt I will test many more because the wifi cards are usually unsupported and everything is just too small, especially the trackpads.
I remember I used my EeePC 900 for Haiku when nothing else was usable. Indeed it boots from SD up to 16 GB (SDHC but not SDXC). Now my EeePC 900 is dead, but maybe I can donate some spare parts of it.
If you can access SD / USB with OpenBSD, can you try to find previous / original version of its BIOS and flash it within OpenBSD?
