This whole blog post looks far too familiar: I previously replaced the crappy 16gb SSD in my Acer Aspire One A110 with a Samsung HS030GA hard drive. I made the non-mistake of fitting a used drive (it wasn't a mistake because the only seller on eBay that was doing rapid shipping only had used drives, and the monitor on my desktop was awaiting replacement; it was either that or a week without any computer, so there), and quite predictably, that died a slow and painful click-of-deathy death. Oh well!

I replaced it with a Toshiba MK3008GAL, which is apparently compatible with 5th generation iPods and Zunes as well, and it works perfectly with Ubuntu 10.04. Once again, if you're doing this yourself, you'll want to go watch tnkgrl's dismantling video, especially if you're replacing an SSD. Also, as I noted in the previous entry, the standard cable that comes with SSD-equipped A110s is too thick for these drives, so you'll need a cable which is 0.35mm thick on one end (typically with a blue connector) and 0.22mm thick on the other. The thick end goes into the motherboard, and the thin end goes into the drive.

I did encounter one bit of weirdness, which was that I got an error message while booting from the Ubuntu 10.04 USB stick which went something like this:

(initramfs) mount: mounting /dev/sda on [something I forgot] failed: Invalid argument

Weird, because /dev/sda was the new drive I installed, and "invalid argument" is (as far as I know) what you'd get if the drive had a screwy partition table or something else gone really, really wrong; apparently whatever data was on that looked enough like a filesystem that it would try and mount it, but not quite enough like a filesystem that it actually could. So I pulled two numbers out of my arse (hey, 8192 is such a cool number that I'll use it twice) and did this at the (initramfs) prompt:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=8192 bs=8192

(Note people coming here from Google: Don't do this if you're not totally, more-certain-than-you-are-of-your-own-existence sure that 1) /dev/sda is actually the hard drive you've just installed AND 2) that you're 100% okay with irrecoverably losing all the data on that drive. Alternatively, if you're not worried about nuking whatever random drive is /dev/sda, that's OK too. This command nukes the first few dozen megabytes of the drive, including the critical partition table, thus making all the data on it unreadable.)

After that and a reboot, Ubuntu booted off the USB stick, installed, and worked flawlessly. The craptop sails again, hooray! :D