Aspire One Linpus Recovery Failure

Hi, I have an Aspire One AOA 110 (ZG5) with the 8Gb SSD running Linpus. I updated Firefox to 3.6.2 a couple of days ago and it has been a bit unstable since. It crashed the whole machine today and I was unable to restart the computer. All I get is the blue screen with the Aspire One logo at the bottom. After no success at getting it started I decided to bite the bullet and reload Linpus using the recovery usb I'd made. No joy. Using both the usb stick and the recovery dvd in an external player I get as far as step 2 of the recovery sequence where it says select partition. The option I get is 'Whole Disc'. When I select this I get a warning about the disc being overwritten and then on hitting ok it immediately gives me 'Error 39!report to [email protected]'. I've tried different usb sticks and working directly from the recovery dvd without success. I'm stuck now as I've reached the limit of my knowledge on Linpus, Aspire One and computers in general :? - can anyone please help?! Thanks, Jim

 

Two thoughts that may help.
Firstly is the usb channel boot enabled in the BIOS? Interrupt the boot sequence and check the device you are using is enabled, promote it to be the first boot device.

Secondly, as I am still waiting for my recovery disk (not supplied with machine but thats another story) I cannot comment on its content, but my experience of other boxes is that it is not generally a full OS. Download and boot a bootable Linux CD to give your machine the onceover. I use Puppy, but many distros provide a bootable Cd/SD card/USB stick image so choose one you are familiar with.
Once up and running use Gparted or chkdsk to check the disk for corruption.

 

Thanks Jimux, yes I've made sure that I have been booting from the usb channel in the BIOS for both the usb stick and the usb CD drive I've been using - with no luck! I've also tried contacting Acer direct and just had this response:

"Thank you for contacting Acer. I apologize for the inconvenience that you have experienced.

We understand your concern,

We would like to inform you that the Acer units that have a 8GB of HDD installed on it are not been provided with a recovery partition to do a recovery on it. In such a case we need to take the unit in for a service. If you find that your computer is in warranty with Acer then please revert to us so we will book the unit for a service as soon as possible."

I'd be interested to know if this is the case, if so why bother shipping a recovery dvd? I guess I'll have to go and learn about other versions of Linux as the Acer recovery dvd 'plan' seems to be lacking something - to say the least! Ho hum.

 

That sounds like the internal cards are set up as compressed loop devices either yaffs or yaffs2 format - like compressed files which are mounted as mountblocks. Some low spec machines are set up that way. Creating and booting from an external image is your best course of action. Once you do that you can explore the internal devices. Have a look at the pupppy.com site.
However if that is the case then you will have difficulty restoring the internal storage as you will need a set of compressed files to load (using the dd command to copy them to the storage) together with location and blocksize information. However you can run it from a plugged in device, and I believe you can upgrade it by putting in a physical hard disk.

 

Hello,
I have an Acer Aspire One D250, and came with Windows XP Home.
I got to stick with image recovery Limpus Aspire One, but after the boot by stick, can not run recovery disk to Limpus install.I wants to format the drive in FAT32 Netbook ?

 

Have you fixed the problem? The same thing is going on with my Acer... I have tried TestDesk and to reformat with Gprated with no luck. going to try the last suggestion in this forum.

 

I fought with the severely limited Linpus for six months with my first AA1, before giving up and switching to Ubuntu, which has become my favorite OS. Ubuntu 9.04 easily fits on, and runs well, from a device as small as an 8gb SDHC card. Xubuntu or Ubuntu desktop remix require less space. Like most things with software, each new release seems to be bigger; 9.10 still fits on an 8gb device, but 10.04 is a tight fit. On a 32gb OCZ Vertex SSD, I have more than 21gb of free space with 9.10 and a lot of documents, including more than 1000 images.

I can't imagine a condition where an OS or application problem would fry the BIOS, but as others have reported, make sure that you can invoke an alternate device during the boot sequence, by holding down F2, making appropriate changes, then on future boots, F12 to choose a boot device.

I screwed up an experimental install of Ubuntu 10.4 recently and had to rebuild my HDD; Windows XP restored without issue from backup discs. At the time, I did not have a restorable backup of Linux; I do now, using remastersys.

 

I have exactly the same problem as Jim described!

Not sure what happened - turned off the AA1 one lunch time earlier this week, and then came to turn it back on later that day and then couldn't progress beyond the Blue Aspire One page!

Checked the Bios - that was fine.

Then created a recovery USB using the supplied recovery CD/DVD - which got as far as Jim did with an "Error39!"

Thinking that the SSD was corrupted, and that the OS was now U/S, I thought I'd install a new OS (Jolicloud) - but that got a input/output error and wouldn't install on the SSD either.

Getting serious, I downloaded GParted and ran that from a bootable USB - which recognised the existing partioning on the 8G SSD, but GParted was not able to reformat the disc/ delete/ repartition - it reports:

Help!!!What's the next step chaps? I've now got an Aspire One A110 paper weight on my desk! Really missing this little machine!

Thanks for any help chaps