How to Get to Factory XP After Installing Ubuntu?

No results on search, so I am asking for help! My Acer Aspire One has the 8 gb SSD and two 8 gb SD cards - the BIOS reads one of the SD cards as a drive, and the other one apparently is simply storage expansion. It came with XP Home. I am no fan of Windows, so I immediately installed Ubuntu 9.04 as the sole OS on the SD, thus completely wiping out XP and the original MBR. I can see the little hidden partition with the folders Book, Factory, i386 and Intel from Ubuntu, so it is still there. In retrospect, I should have done manual partitioning, and put the Ubuntu boot up stuff on the SSD and everything else on the SD card, but I didn't, so there you go, that is the state of things right now.

Now I have one program that I really want to be able to run that requires Windows. So, what I want to do is get the machine back to its out-of-the-box factory state. The box came with two CDs, and both are bootable on my cheap little external USB CD drive. But when I boot from either one, they appear to be identical - both start out saying "Loading Windows files" and then get me to a screen that offers a choice to restore to factory. When I choose this, it goes along and does stuff for a while and then asks me to insert "Restore CD 1." Whichever one I boot from, the other one is NOT the Restore CD 1 apparently. So question 1 is, if I buy the alleged Restore CDs from Acer for $20, will I get something new and different, or will I just get another two CDs like the ones that came in the box? I sure don't want to do that...

Carrying on with what I did next. I fired up my cheap little USB floppy drive and fdisk'd and formatted the C: drive of the SSD. Then I copied the i386 folder from the hidden partition (accessing the hidden partition from a USB stick Ubuntu "live CD" and copying the files) and copied them from the USB stick back to my new DOS C: drive. Next I reinstalled XP by executing winnt.exe from the i386 folder, which got me to a sort of functional XP, that boots but does not know anything about the Acer devices (lots of yellow question marks in the device manager). I had to call MS to activate with the license info on the sticker on the computer because on of the devices XP couldn't deal with is the wireless stuff.

To add insult to injury, Ubuntu guided install now does not know that the SSD is there, and the Ubuntu install to the SD card fails at the end when GRUB tries to write the boot loader to the SD card instead of the SSD. I know this is an Ubuntu question, but if anybody knows how to cope with this so Ubuntu installs on the SD card and the boot loader installs on the SSD, would appreciate hearing from you!

I would be pretty close if I could just find and install all the Acer Aspire One specific drivers, even if I couldn't access the eRecovery stuff. If I ever get there, I will make an HDClone image of the drive but it is too late to do that now! So the next question is, can I download all the Acer Aspire One specific drivers somewhere? The model is ZG5 and the Acer site does not seem to offer driver downloads for this puppy. But if there were just some recovery disks I could restore to factory condition from, that would be the cat's meow.

So thanks for any help and advice anybody can offer!

 

I think I am in a similar situation.

I too have the 8GB SSD XP Acer One that shipped with an extra 8GB SD card.

After wiping out XP I installed Netbook Remix. I wasn't able to install it to the SD card because of the GRUB error you mentioned.
Never figured out how to. I did read on the Ubuntu forums website that it wasn't possible.

Now I want to do a recovery from the two disks I received with my Acer.
One disk is the System CD and the other is Win XP SP 3 (on a DVD).

I have only experienced failure and I think it is related to having the wrong disks but I could be wrong.

My recovery fails when I am asked to insert 'recoverycd1' which I think is the XP disk.
I have to use alt-tab to see the error message. 'error copying z:\images\pop01021pzen3c21.swm'
I think the external drive booted as an x:\ drive and that is why it can't read from the second disk or 'recoverycd1'.

Acer has been no help and asked me to purchase new disks for $20.00 like yourself.
I doubt I got the wrong disks out of the box but you never know.
I too would like to know what you get when they ship you the cds for this model.

No help from me but I would like to know how you solved your problem(s) or if anyone has any insights on the recovery
process for an Acer One 8GB SSD XP.

 

I solved the problem - no help here unfortunately - by taking the long way around, which I will lay out.

I used a USB floppy drive to fdisk and format c: and then booted the Acer Aspire One from a 2 gb Ubuntu USB stick. I then mounted both the new c: and the little hidden partition in Ubuntu, and copied the i386 directory from the hidden partition to the new c: drive, and quit Ubuntu.

I then booted from the a: drive and ran winnt.exe in the c:\i386 directory. This got me to a usable XP installation that needed to be activated, which I did by phone using the product key on the bottom of the computer. Then I downloaded and installed all the Acer specific drivers for my model (A0A 110). b

So I now have an XP installation that works the same way the factory installation did, I don't know whether it is identical or not, but it works fine.

 

I finally figured out the problem with my Recovery Disks not working on my AOA110-1588 8GB SSD XP netbook.
(no recovery partition, no alt-F10 option)

I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix (wiping out the previous partition info and installing the EXT3 file system).
When I tried using the recovery cd and windows xp dvd to reinstall I always got hung up after inserting the win xp dvd with an error message about z:\ drive and not being able to read a file system. I always thought it was having a problem reading the dvd but it ended up being the ssd drive it was having a problem reading! Duh.

So I wiped the drive and put a FAT 32 file system on board.

Then I started up the recovery CDs and it went through with out an error message.

I have windows XP back on the system now as it shipped from the factory. And I will have an extra set of replacement disks after ordering them for $20.00!

Netbook Remix was/is a great OS but the Atheros driver was buggy and I couldn't get MADWIFI to work. Don't know if that would've helped. The wireless card disconnected often and especially when doing any heavy downloading.

Lesson learned I guess.

 

I have the same problem, how do I put fat32 on the ssd to get the install started?

Thanks

 

I put a Fat32 file system on my AOA110 by using a Ubuntu Live CD and using the Partion Manager program.

You can also make a Bootable USB stick using Unetbootin from a downloaded .iso or use another program that makes a bootable USB stick from a .img file.

Make sure to back up your files first.

 

Thanks, somehow I managed to format the drive and get windows to load , I forgot how slow windows is. I think I will load the Acer Linpus image back in, it is fast, no frills though.

 

I found that the Recovery CD Win XP SP3 OS works great with my 8GB SSD after installing the Flashfire driver.
Stops all the annoying pauses, increases boot time and generally makes one love their AOA again!
I also had to upgrade my Atheros wifi driver using Windows Update to solve my disconnection problem.

There are many posts on this site about installing Flashfire.
I haven't had any issues with the driver.

Good luck.