linpus aspire one recovery help!!

I recently got a bluetooth mouse and usb bluetooth dongle for my Linpus Lite acer Aspire One netbook. I used a post on this forum,

viewtopic.php?f=36&t=789

to attempt to install bluetooth packages for the OS, so that I could get the mouse working meaning I wouldn't be reliant on the small keypad. I think I made an error on instruction 4 in the above post, when I was copying bluetooth files to the kernel. I might have deleted some extra files in the kernel / drivers / net directory that weren't related to bluetooth. I restarted the laptop and now the mouse pointer doesn't work and the keyboard has stopped working once the OS loads. Tried function + f7 but I think the whole system has been disabled as the wireless doesn't even attempt to connect. I just get the standard linpus screen with all the options but am unable to do anything.

Can anyone advise me on what to do next please? I know I might need to do a usb recovery but it looks like a bit of a nightmare reading others posts and I'm no Linux expert (clearly)! I don't have a usb cd drive but have read I might need a 2GB stick to d/l recovery files??

Thanks
Pete.

 

If you need a recovery image for an AOA110 or AOA150 (i.e., the ZG5), I've got a compressed version at http://deli.no-ip.org/aa1. Just gunzip the file, then use dd to copy it to a 2GB USB flash drive. The flash drive will be bootable. Boot your Apsire One with it and install.

 

cheers for that! I've downloaded and unpacked that file onto my Vista desktop PC using WinRAR, as my only Linux access is through the (currently) unusable netbook. I'm waiting on a new USB flash drive order to arrive before I can attempt the recovery, as mine are only 1GB. I'm not too sure what the 'dd' command does though - is it just for copying files? When my larger USB flash drive does arrive, do you know if it will it be bootable to the netbook if I just copy the unpacked, 2GB recovery file onto it from my Vista desktop PC, just using the standard drag and drop copying method of the file in Vista to a USB drive ? Or does the Linux 'dd' command perform some kind of additional conversion / boot sector write from Linux for Linux, that I'd need to do from Vista (i.e. is it anything more than just a straighforward copy)?

Thanks
Pete

 

Standard drag-and-drop won't work here. The file aa1_usb_recovery_image is an actual disk image, boot sector and all. The dd command does a direct bit-for-bit copy from one file or device to another file or device - in this case, we want to copy from the file aa1_usb_recovery_image to the usb flash drive device. It's very much like taking an iso file and copying it to a cd or dvd. In fact, under Linux, one uses the dd command to accomplish this.

I'm sure there are ways to accomplish the transfer of the recovery image to the flash drive under Windows, but I have never needed to do that, so I haven't looked into it in any detail. You might check some of the postings in the forum from the first few months after the release of the first Aspire Ones.

Good Luck!

 

got it working, used the Ubuntu website to create a flash stick within Windows to put Ubuntu on the netbook (does ISO file unpacking / copying automatically) using Univeral USB installer which is downloadable for Windows from the Ubuntu website. It creates a bootable USB flash stick that installs Ubuntu and netbook working fine now. Was really easy, took 15 mins. Cheers for the help

 

thanls for sharing. http://laptop-download.blogspot.com/2010/06/free-shadowprotect-server-edition.html this Fast and Reliable Disaster Recovery

 

My Acer Aspire One ZG5 with Linux-Lite stopped giving me the screen menu. When I turn the netbook on now, all I get is an icon with battery in the upper left corner, a small icon for home in the lower left, the system tray, clock/date, and the WiFi light is staying on. I had bought a new battery for the netbook (computer is 2 years old) and had been charging/discharging the battery to "calibrate" the battery per the recommendation, and after turning the netbook on after 3rd recharge, all I got was the black display with the small icons. The cursor works as does shutdown/restart.

I downloaded the file that was posted for a usb recovery (the CD that came with my netbook kept giving me an error code 39 on my PC when I tried to make a usb recovery), unzipped it and extracted it directly to a 4.0 gb usb memory stick. I then went into the netbook, hit F12 during reboot of netbook, changed the boot to the USB memory stick which was identified in the list of boot, saved it and let the computer go through boot up sequence. All I get is a flashing cursor in the upper left hand corner and a black screen.

Is there something I'm not doing correctly to get this recovery USB to work?

Please advise. I'm getting ready to leave for Africa in 2 weeks for a cycling race that takes place over 4 months and I need to take this netbook with me to write an online daily journal

Thanks
Len

 

My Acer Aspire One ZG5 with Linux-Lite stopped giving me the screen menu. When I turn the netbook on now, all I get is an icon with battery in the upper left corner, a small icon for home in the lower left, the system tray, clock/date, and the WiFi light is staying on. I had bought a new battery for the netbook (computer is 2 years old) and had been charging/discharging the battery to "calibrate" the battery per the recommendation, and after turning the netbook on after 3rd recharge, all I got was the black display with the small icons. The cursor works as does shutdown/restart.

I downloaded the file that was posted for a usb recovery (the CD that came with my netbook kept giving me an error code 39 on my PC when I tried to make a usb recovery), unzipped it and extracted it directly to a 4.0 gb usb memory stick. I then went into the netbook, hit F12 during reboot of netbook, changed the boot to the USB memory stick which was identified in the list of boot, saved it and let the computer go through boot up sequence. All I get is a flashing cursor in the upper left hand corner and a black screen.

Is there something I'm not doing correctly to get this recovery USB to work?

Please advise. I'm getting ready to leave for Africa in 2 weeks for a cycling race that takes place over 4 months and I need to take this netbook with me to write an online daily journal

Thanks
Len

 

You appear to have been doing things properly. From where did you download your file? Just want to be sure we're dealing with the same recovery image. Also, when you say you "extracted it directly to the usb memory stick", how exactly did you do that?

Given the age of Linpus Lite and the fact that you'll be wiping the internal disk drive doing a recovery, you might want to consider installing a more up-to-date distro.

 

I think it was your file that I downloaded as you had indicated on this forum back in July, I believe, an image file which was something like 2gb. I downloaded that on my PC then when I extracted the file in winzip, I let it extract to the 4gb usb memory stick.

I don't know much about linpus or even what a "distro" is. Is this a file that I'd find somewhere. I just need to get this thing back to running again, as I'm taking it to Africa with me on a 4 month cycling trip and write a daily journal of the trip for sponsors. If I don't get this back up, I'll end up having to shell out another $400 for a new one! The thing I don't understand is that this thing was working just fine until I bought the new 9 cell battery, then went through the process of "calibrating" the battery by charging/discharging 3-4 times. When I turned the computer on to let it discharge 3 of the 4 times, all was ok. But on the 4th turn on for another discharge, that's when I lost the menu, black screen with just several icons, and kpowersave on the bottom. I don't believe it's hardware related since I have time/date, system tray, battery icon indicator of time left on charge. My son things we should just install Windows 7 on it (he has one with Windows 7) but this is only an 8Gb SSD computer with another 8gb SD card and 1Gb of RAM. I loved that with Linux I didn't need a lot of virus stuff and never had a problem with in the 2 years I've had it. And it's been all over the world on cycling trips, loaded into a pannier on the back of the bike in all kinds of temperatures. Hate to see it fail me now.

 

Silly question but...
did you make the usb drive bootable? easiest way is to download unetbootin on another windows machine and plug in your usb flashdrive. Start unetbootin and browse to your iso file (hit the box with 3 dots in it), make sure its pointed at your usb flash drive in the bottom 2 fields and hit the ok button. Then you can plug it in hit f12 on the acer screen at boot and select your usb from the list there and it should all be good if your hardware is ok. Basically you cant just extract onto a usb using winzip.
Using the above you can also download other distributions (distros) of linux such as Linux Mint etc and try them out if you get no success with the iso you have. Mint works out of the box and is based on ubuntu see my signature.
Hope it helps and PM me if you need

 

The file I posted is a complete filesystem image. It is bootable. Unetbootin and similar utilities do not enter into the process. The command to install the uncompressed image file (here named ifile) onto a flash drive (here assumed to be /dev/flash) under Linux is just

Code:

dd if=ifile of=/dev/flash

Extracting the compressed file to the flash drive via winzip is not the proper course of action. The image needs to be uncompressed, then the uncompressed image needs to be "burned" to the flash drive the same way an iso file is burned to a CD. I believe people were using Nero and similar tools to do this back in the early days of the Aspire One. Check out some of the early posts regarding the use of the Linpus recovery image.

 

Thanks! I'm going to wait until my son gets home from Australia. I talked with him on email about the problem, and he basically said the same thing, that I couldn't put that file onto a memory stick that way (I didn't know!). He is an IT director and works with Linux most of the time, so said this won't be a problem and will get it running in a couple weeks when he gets home!

Thanks for all your help though!