Nrtbook thing again

Cunning plan no. 1 just failed - it doesn't boot from a Linux USB stick, and if there's a non-bios menu for selecting boot order I can't find it.

Looks like it's a 2.5" IDE drive inside. Before I splurge on a new one (which probably won't have an OS) does anyone local have a spare I can try, and the ability to put something like Ubuntu on it?

And within minutes I found the boot menu (it's F8 I think, I tried pressing the function keys wildly during bootup), and it's starting up Ubuntu from a memory stick.

Works but doesn't seem to be able to use the WIFI, presumably because it isn't installed properly. I think this gives me confidence to buy a drive. Shouldn't be too expensive, I hope.

later still Actually it appears to be a 1.8" IDE ZIF fitting drive. Not good news, they're obsolete and expensive, and ZIF makes the choice very limited.

however it looks like I can get a 1.8" CF card adapter for a fiver £1.38 (delivery from Hong Kong but usually that is OK) and say a 16gb CF card for about the same price as a 20gb hard drive. The advantage of this is that I have a 2gb CF card and can try this out before splurging on the card. Think I'll go that route, it ought to give a battery life boost for a slight speed cost. And there are so few compatible drives out there that this may be my best way to be sure of compatibility!

Netbook update

What I've decided to do is get the drive adapter so I can use a 2gb CF card to test that the drive controller works correctly, but once I've tested it, buy a 30gb hard drive - there are some on eBay around 24 quid, and a 16GB CF would cost nearly as much and have a finite life. Probably be a week or two before the card adapter arrives and I buy a drive if everything is OK, so in the meantime if anyone spots something really cheap please let me know. The specifications again -

1.8" IDE, ZIF interface, IDE Ultra ATA/66 (ATA-5)