Raw USB Recovery Image

Hi there!

I've seen quite a few people that have been having trouble with creating a usb recovery disk from the recovery DVD that came with the Acer Aspire One. I just experienced the same issue myself (after booting on the DVD, and selecting the option to create a USB recovery disk, everything froze at the loading screen, with my Caps Lock light blinking endlessly). I was in dire need of of an image of the USB Recovery Disk, but it was nowhere to be found. I've now managed to get hold of it, the size is about 959MB. Problem is I've nowhere to put it for others to get hold of it. Does anyone know of a place where I can upload a file that size? Once I get a place to upload it to, I'll be happy to post instructions on how to place it on your USB-storage device without the need of the recovery DVD itself.

 

I already provided jbg with hosting space so you should be hearing from him very soon.

 

Great idea ! Hopefully you can use the hosting space mentionned just above. I, for one, am definitely interested in that.

 

daymz, the file (once it finishes uploading) will be available on http://onebuntu.org. It will stay there for everyone who needs the file ...!

 

If you had looked in the downloads area, you would have seen it online already

Located on two places is no issue.

 

Sid, what's the big deal about Linpus - 1.5G RAM and no swap? I have 512MB RAM and it doesn't use the swap.

Cheers.

 

Sid, I don't see a download of the raw usb recovery image in the Download-section. Mind linking it?

I'm not sure if I've explained this thoroughly enough, but this isn't an image of the Recovery DVD, but an image of the Recovery USB Drive that you are able to create through the Recovery DVD.

A big thanks to gouki for providing some space for the image.

You can find the image at http://onelinux.org/recovery/aa1_usb_recovery_image.gz.

Now, instructions.

I had to use an external USB drive for this, as I don't have a USB-pen that's above 125MB, but it works just the same. Besides the Acer One Aspire, I've another machine with Fedora 9 on it. Once the external drive was plugged in, this is what dmesg came up with:

Code:

usb 2-2.1: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=0702
usb 2-2.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-2.1: Product: External HDD    
usb 2-2.1: Manufacturer: Western Digital 
usb 2-2.1: SerialNumber: 575845363037433636303733
usb-storage: device found at 14
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
usb-storage: device scan complete
scsi 16:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WD       1200BEVExternal  1.02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
sd 16:0:0:0: [sdb] 234441648 512-byte hardware sectors (120034 MB)
sd 16:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 16:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
sd 16:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 16:0:0:0: [sdb] 234441648 512-byte hardware sectors (120034 MB)
sd 16:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 16:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
sd 16:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
 sdb: sdb1
sd 16:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
sd 16:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
 

So now we know that the drive has been assigned /dev/sdb. Let's make the recovery usb drive then.

WARNING: This next command will end up erasing your WHOLE drive, so be cautious when you type it.

Code:

# zcat aa1_usb_recovery_image.gz > /dev/sdb

Notice that it's /dev/sdb and NOT /dev/sdb1, as we're overwriting the whole disk, and not just a partition of the disk.

That did the trick for me. Once the command was completed, remount the external drive and you'll see that the new contents is there. Unmount it again, plug it into your Acer Aspire One, boot the machine, and press F12 during boot to select the USB-pen/external harddrive as the device to boot. You should be on your way towards recovery.

If anyone knows how to do this in Windows please feel free to post a followup.

Good luck!

 

Works perfectly! Thank you very much for the detailed instructions.

 

Apologies, I read this as an image of the CD.

 

Turning off the swap file, allowed me to recover the 1gb of space on the SSD that was being used for the swap partition.
I run workspaces and regularly have 20+ apps open. I don't often get over 512 but as you know Linux doesn't like a full swap file

 

i got error with this command:

Code:

# zcat aa1_usb_recovery_image.gz > /dev/sdb

"bash: /dev/sdb: Permission denied"
the usb device is mounted as sdb. so what's wrong?
i'm using ubuntu 8.04

 

Try it with sudo in front (to execute the command with root permissions.

Like so:

Code:

# sudo zcat aa1_usb_recovery_image.gz > /dev/sdb

 

sudo in the front didn't help...

i solved this problem by:

Code:

sudo chmod 666 /dev/sdb

 

Please use the following URL to get the image from now on:

http://onelinux.org/recovery

I had a few problems with the other domain. Those who mentioned the URL on their earlier posts, please update them to reflect this change.

 

Point of order:

sudo will not help when redirecting output via < > etc, as these are associated with the current user. you need to type:

sudo su -

then the command without sudo, as root.

 

I need help with this as well. I installed Ubuntu and want to get rid of it for various reasons (we all know them!), but the Recovery DVD won't boot in one computer, destroyed the partitions on another, and gives error 39 on the final...seems that Acer didn't do a very good job with this software.

Anyway, I'm trying to make a bootable USB drive (2gb). Untebootin (for windows) installs on the drive, but the drive won't boot. Curiously enough, unetbootin works just fine for making an Ubuntu install on the very same flash drive. I tried to follow the instructions in this thread and came up empty. I verified the USB drive mounts as SDB. So I enter the following into the command line in Ubuntu 8.04

Code:

sudo su -
# zcat aa1_usb_recovery_image.gz > /dev/sdb
gzip: aa1_usb_recovery_image.gz: No Such file or directory

what's am I doing wrong? I just downloaded the image to the desktop. Do I have to put the image in a specific location first, or unpack it, or do some other tom-foolery to let the computer know where it is? I'm new to linux so I don't have a grasp on the commands, but I can follow directions diligently (I did actually manage to build the wireless driver in ubuntu 8.04).

 

@Tavel: You aren't necessarily doing anything wrong...you're just in the wrong directory. Since you downloaded the file to your desktop use this command:

Code:

zcat ~/Desktop/aa1_usb_recovery_image.gz > /dev/sdb

The tilda "~" directs the terminal to your home directory and anything after that are folders/files within. You can also navigate to the directory that the file was saved to and then use the original command. Your choice. Hope that helps.

Edit: Also, since you are admittedly new...the # should not be typed in the terminal when entering commands...it simply represents the prompt.

 

hi im trying to do this as well but i have no grasp of linux

im trying to create this usb recovery on a windows pc where would i enter these commands?

i know this sounds dumb im sorry lol

ben

 

To Mikespug: Thank you so much for clarifying that. I just KNEW it was something astoundingly simple like that.

I ran the command and it hashed out on the flash drive a little bit, but then sometime near the end it ran out of space. I figure my "2gb" flash drive is actually just a few megabytes short. so I ran out to get a 4GB flash drive and it worked perfectly.

btw: I knew not to put the hash in the command, but all the guides show the # or $ to show what permission levels the commands run in...so that's what I did! haha.

my command ended up looking like this

Code:

sudo su - 
zcat /home/alex/Desktop/aa1_usb_recovery_image.gz > /dev/sdb

and POW, fresh Linpus install. It'll be nice to have battery life greater than an hour :lol:

Benkin: These are Linux commands, I don't think the Windows DOS Prompt has any equivalent. You could try doing it in a live session of Ubuntu if you don't want to install linux.

 

is there anyway i could do this from a windows pc?