Acer Aspire One XP home recovery via Knoppix

OR a factory default XP lies hidden on that first partition almost ready to reset the second partition

• 1. Get USB CD ROM (or DVD) drive.

  2. Burn a copy of KNOPPIX.

     1. Most likely a USB KNOPPIX version would work, but I still haven't gotten around to building one.

  3. Turn ON USB Drive, Place KNOPPIX CD in Drive, connect USB

  4. drive to USB Port on ACER ASPIRE ONE.

  5. Press Power button and Press F12 for Boot List

  6. From the "Boot Option Menu"

  7. Select, using the arrow keys, the USB CD drive as boot device and press Enter.

  8. Press Enter at KNOPPIX boot: prompt

  9. Press Spacebar at "You have passed an undefined mode number" message.

  10. Once KNOPPIX boots, bring up a Root Shell (from Penguin icon on Toolbar (2nd from the left))

  11. You should see a root prompt like this root@Knoppix:~#

  12. Using the '-l' for list partitions option, run the fdisk command.

  13. root@Knoppix:~# fdisk -l

  14. [... A list of partitons and drive data appears

  15. Note that /dev/sda2 has an asterisk in the Boot column and is marked for bootable.

  16. Note also that /dev/sda1 is of type Id 12 Compaq diagnostics

  17. ...]

  18. root@Knoppix:~# fdisk /dev/sda

  19. Command (m for help): p

  20. [...the partition table lists out.

  21. We want to change the first partition to bootable

  22. a

  23. 1

  24. p

  25. [...note the change of the asterisk appearing or...]

  26. a

  27. 2

  28. p

  29. [...note the change...]

  30. w

  31. q

  32. root@Knoppix:~# reboot

  33. Starting ACER eRecovery Management Environment

  34. and Bar underneath

  35. Go through the steps.

  36. If your Acer Inspire continues to boot into the ACER eRecovery Management Environment, like ours, it is probably because the FAT32 recovery partition was marked bootable in the partition table.

  37. So just repeat the fdisk proecdure to set the bootable flag on the first partition off and the bootable flag on the second partion on once more.

• • 1. Note: I changed the partition type to "c" from "12", but apparently that's not necessary.

You could do all this quicker by going knoppix 2 at the boot: prompt, which would give you a text mode root shell, but hey then you would miss all the pretty pictures. Minimize the Knoppix window or click on 2 or 3 or 4 to get to another desktop, so you can see the drive icons.

Your drive is marked:

Hard Drive

[sda2]

The recovery part of the drive is

Hard Drive

[sda1]

And if you need to recover files from the Windows partition, single clicking on the sda2 to mount the User's Windows partition and later right-clicking on sda2 to change to read/write mode to try to fix things.