Acer Recovery DVD is LETHAL

I modified parts of Linpus more to Xfce liking including the right click menu. This Menu has a 'Software Update' which I now think applies to Fedora Werewolf (?) and not to Linpus. Anyway it screwed up hal and the system.
So I had to make a USB boot stick using the Acer DVD. The instructions on screen are very straight forward. I have twice tried to make a recovery USB and each time it wiped my Desk PC completely. That is the whole of the first disk sector map and I would like to find an easy way to recover the partitions, if anyone has any suggestions?

It seems the only way would be to unplug the existing hard drives so that this dreadful disk can't do its dirty work on your existing system, and that would not suit everyone's ability. I hope this note will help others to avoid this fate.
My conclusion is the disk should be broken up and binned.

Somewhere on the DVD there must be an original copy of the OS. Any suggestions for extracting this and writing it to a bootable USB. I gather it is not possible to boot from a plug in memory card so I bought a usb Card Reader to do this.

 

I also discovered that the Linpus restore disk is useless in creating the USB restore, although on viewing the DVD contents within an OS reveals a tantilising glimpse of everything you need. I use this method:

http://dailycupoftech.com/2008/09/02/di ... sb-device/

but am also always on the lookout for a streamlining method using the contents of the original disk, just not their useless autobooting method

Cheers
Ramsey

 

The method described in the url you cited is probably as streamlined as it's going to get under Windows.
Under Linux: gunzip -c aa1_usb_recovery_image.gz > /dev/sdb where /dev/sdb is the usb stick that will receive the image