I've been doing some experiments with retired educational HP Chromebooks (11" and 14" G4) and I found out that it is fairly easy to remove the write protection on the firmware, flash a new modern UEFI BIOS and install essentially any OS that will run on a 6-year-old laptop with 4G and a dual core CPU. So far I have converted four of the laptops to a fork of Ubuntu and they work great. Battery lasts forever because there isn't any serious hardware in there to suck up the watts.

So, I was thinking, this would be an inexpensive way to make yourself an SDD laptop. The Chromebooks only have a 16GB SSD but you can plug in an SD card of just about any size and install the software there. I would install Windows XP, because 10 and 11 are out of the question, they are giant pigs.

Any interest in something like this?

 

All kinds of assistance on this is easily found in the jaguarforums.com.
Including references to the many versions, downloads and gotchas during install.

 

Well, hit a wall. Anyone know how to force the JLR SDD installer to continue the install to a removable device like an SD Card?

 

I installed the Raspbian linux OS to an SD card a long time ago when I was tinkering with a Raspberry Pi. It worked, but that's a different animal than what you're trying to do.

Doesn't the 16GB SSD in the Chromebook have enough free disk space for SDD? Or does it have a USB port ... maybe SDD will install to a USB drive.

 

No. Yes, but it won't allow me to select it for installation.

 

Since JLR SDD is a Windows app, it may require Windows-specific resources like registry entries. Chrome may not work in any case.

Might be cheaper (accounting for the value of your time) to just buy a used WinXP laptop on Craigslist or FB Marketplace and go from there.

 

I'm not installing on Chrome, I am installing on Windows 10 because the firmware update that allows UEFI O/S installations only accepts Win 10 or 11, or Ubuntu and others. Windows XP is not UEFI. If I gave up every time I hit a bump I'd never accomplish anything.

 

I know that it's very satisfying to conquer a technical challenge. More power to ya and Happy New Year!

 

Well, what I had in mind cannot be done with the HP Chromebook 11 G4 because even though I could install Win10 (nothing less than that will work on the UEFI firmware), the SSD is 16gb and some "bright" engineer decided it should be soldered on the mobo and not upgradeable. An SD card or USB stick will not help because JLR SDD will not install on a removable drive, courtesy of some other "bright" engineer.

However, this will work on an HP Chromebook 14 G4 because for a mere $17 and a bit of elbow grease I can upgrade the SSD to 128gb. More than enough for the task. The SSD is on order, arrives Saturday. More updates later, but it looks like a very inexpensive JLR SDD dedicated laptop will be doable (I can get retired HP Chromebook 14 G4's =really= cheap nowadays).

 

Interesting project! I guess a CB11 is like a cell phone where everything is miniaturized and soldered in place. The larger CB14 offers more room for replaceable components.

Without taking off the cover to visually inspect the SSD, does the BIOS screen on both devices give you any indication if the SSD is replaceable? Same question for upgrading the memory?