A1 fixed itself.

I don't know what happened but, today my A1 stopped working properly. Somehow, the touchpad decided it would activate the left click whenever it felt like it. I tried to click around the desktop but nothing worked!

So I tried to shut it down view the bottom right corner shut down button but instead it logged me out! I tried to log back in but nothing worked, I couldn't even click in the password box to log in to my desktop.

I had no other option but to turn it off, I held down the power button and restarted the computer. When it booted up...the disaster happened. It couldn't recognize barely any of the hardware like the sound card, WiFi adapter, LAN port (I couldn't even get on the Internet)... I couldn't even copy my files to a USB drive to restore the Linpus OS. No matter how hard I tried or restarted the A1, nothing would work.

At this point I considered restoring even with losing my files... but it was almost to much to recover. I then began researching things to do... but they were all to complicated for me to understand, the Linux jargon flew over my head. Sadly, my computer froze looking for one the files described in the tutorial. I had to hard boot again.

After the restart, the WiFi adapter started connecting to my home network! Soon enough, I checked all my files, drivers and such and for some reason, my situation had become completely reversed. All the hardware/software conflicts were resolved!

Any idea how this happened in the first place?

 

Are you using SD storage expansion?? Someone already reported similar problem with his AA1 and apparently that was linked to some files stored on SD card. System "lost" card from some reasons and "collapsed"... After three or four reboots everything healed itself...

 

No, I wasn't using a SD card in the expansion slot. But now that I know it could cause similar problems...I may avoid using them in that slot.

 

I have my AA1 is about 10 days now, it's a Linpus, 512 RAM and 8GB SSD model (A110B)

I have been trying to work in sometime each day to look at various customisations and optimizations. Anyhow I had set myself the task of getting it running with our office wireless network today, all the other PC's are running Windows 2000 Pro so integrated a Linux box was something that I hadn't done before.

With the help of these forums I downloaded and installed pyNeighborhood and everything was running great, the AA1 could access all the other PC's on the network and I was about to look at how to make it possible for me to transfer files from my Win2K to the AA1 across the network. I had to work on something else and needed to clear my desk, so I shutdown the AA1, when I restarted it a little while later I found:

- It would not connect to any network, wireless or wired, in fact it appeared that it was no longer recoginising that it had any network adaptors.
- The I noticed that it was not detecting correctly whether or not the power supply was connected, it was displaying the "plug" no matter whether it was running from battery or mains
- Then I notice that the "sound card" was not being recognised (speaker icon had a X) and when I saw it first I thought I had muted the sound but the Volume Control would not run
- I tried to run Terminal, but while the terminal window opened, I was not logged in and could not enter any command.
- Thunar was running but not fully, the shortcuts in the bottom of the left panel were missing
- It did not recognise the insertion of a USB memory stick

I tried rebooting several times, shut it down several times and the problems persisted. I eventually became resigned to the fact that I would need to re-install Linpus and created a boot USB device. Just before installing the USB, I shutdown the AA1 but instead of clicking shutdown I pressed and held the power button. The switched it on, it started to boot but was taking much longer and seemed to pause at the "Blue Aspire One" screen, then it rebooted and started up normally - suddenly the power and sound controls were working but not the Network, so I pressed and held the power button again and then turned on again, this time when it started everything was working again and it connected to the network.

Does pressing and holding the power button and then turning back on cause the AA1 to run some extra diagnostics at power on?

It's a little worrying that this happens as we are considering deploying about 500 pieces of the AA1 to a customer - today's events are causing me to reconsider our choice of hardware/OS - I'm wondering if this is an instability of the hardware, OS or combination of both and wonder if an ASUS or other device might be more reliable. Any thoughts?

 

The Atheros WiFi card is known for completely disappearing, even in Windows. Mine stopped doing it after almost a year of tolerating it, but it's probably related to some driver and configuration tweaks. Anyway, what it would do in WinXP is lose connection, fail repair, show a yellow mark in the Device Manager, disappear when disabled/endables in DM, and re-appear after putting the notebook to sleep and waking it up (would not fix the issue if you hadn't gotten it to disappear). Otherwise, I'd have to restart. This usually worked, but sometimes the process wasn't enough.

I don't know much about Linux, but I'd imagine that hardware that "disappears" may find it's hardware resources in-use when it tries to "reappear." Couldn't this trigger a cascade of resource conflicts, leading to the observed behavior?