Bricked chromebooks and finding a replacement for one

Sorry for the lack of images, I didn't want to find a file hosting site since this is supposed to be a quick entry. If anyone's interested in the images, I can send them over.

At the start of summer this year, I tried replacing chromeOS on my chromebook and failed spectacularly to the point where it was stuck on the "ChromeOS is missing or damaged" screen. Ctrl+D and recovery drives wouldn't work, so I ditched the project up until now, when I remembered I needed a laptop for school.

I could always borrow a chromebook from the school, which is the easiest and most obvious solution. They can connect to the student wifi, they have all the apps needed for district testing... but they're very locked down and privacy invasive, especially with the software they introduced this year.

I didn't like that, and I had a chromebook I could use, so I decided to try fixing it. After a hour of googling I found a (sort of) solution outside of "use a recovery drive" and I pressed tab to look at why it didnt want to boot. If you want to take a look, here it is.

HWID: SNAPPY E25-(some other hexanumbers)

recovery_reason: 0x5b / 0x5b No bootable kernel found on disk

VbSD.flags: 0x0003cc40

VbNv.raw: 60 10 00 00 00 02 5b 4c 00 00 00 00 00 00 36

dev_boot_usb: 0

dev_boot_legacy: 0

dev_default_boot: 0

dev_boot_signed_only: 0

dev_boot_fastboot_full_cap: 0

TPM: fwver=0x000a0001 kernver=0x00000000

gbb.flags: 0x00000000

gbb.rootkey: (Jesus christ, I'm not typing this by hand.)

gbb,recovery_key: (see above)

read-only firmware id: Google_Snappy.9042.253.0

active firmware id: Google_Snappy.9042.253.0

TPM state: v=1 failed tries=0 max_tries=200

I realize now it would have been quicker to just find a image hosting site. Something something about laziness, there's a deeper meaning that I'm not gonna decipher here.

Anyways, the kernel wouldn't boot, so using my elementary understanding of computers, I decided I could fix it by replacing the SSD. It would take a week for the drive to ship, but I was okay with waiting that long.

I looked up what the SSD looked like for chromebooks, I had the chromebook torn apart on a little rack at the moment when I did this, and struggled to figure out where it was. Maybe it was specific to a type of chromebook I thought, so I googled it for the model I had (HP 11a-nb0013dx) to no avail. 

I looked up a teardown for the chromebook. Maybe it was buried under another circuit?
Nope. It wasnt there. There is literally no SSD for the chromebook. Maybe I missed it as I was fast forwarding through the video at 1 am, but I did not have one. There was no SSD to replace.

So, now I'm figuring out a use for the raspberry pi thats been gathering dust in my shelf. I have low expectations for it, but I'm hoping it'll be able to at least run firefox. I have a touchscreen for it, which I'm not excited to use, but I'll have to see if it can work if I cant find an uncomfortably small keyboard for the weirdly shaped case I'm planning to use for it. I dont know if the raspberry pi os supports touchscreens, or if any linux distro does out of the box.

I'll come back with updates on the pi later.