Hi all,

I recently snagged an HP Omnibook XE3 (GF model) off ebay in superb condition. I've been having some fun tinkering with it, put in an IDE to SD card adapter and the maximum 1gb of RAM. It's working great for XP and 98 purposes.

Unfortunately I'm running into an issue where any attempt I have with Linux is failing, primarily on recognising or being able to write to the internal IDE with the SD card.

I've tried Debian 32 bit, Gparted on Hirens boot CD, Xubuntu 18.04.5 32 bit and most recently Arch Linux 32. I've tried installing off burned CD/DVDs and USB using Plop boot manager. Sometimes I can get to a live session or installer but the partition setup will fail. Other times it will crap out during boot with buffer i/o errors.

XP will recognise and install on the SD card as if it's a normal IDE HDD, no problem. Anyone have any experience with this?

Cheers.