Recovering an Aspire One D250-1613

Hi. I'm hoping someone can help me. I have an Acer Aspire One D250-1613 that was originally installed with Win XP. I loaned it to a friend whose wife accidentally dropped it on the floor. Now it won't boot. I've attempted to perform the Alt-F10 recovery and it looks to get almost 100% complete then fails. I've taken the drive out of the netbook and put it in a drive case to look at it. Windows won't even recognize it as a formatted disk. My Mac at least sees the two partitions (disk1s2 and disk2s2) but can't read or verify (error check) anything.

At this point, it appears that I am going to need to reformat the drive and reload everything. Unfortunately, I don't have any recovery CDs as I was relying on the recovery partition, which is now unreadable. I found downloads on the Acer support website for many of the programs, but I need to get my OS back. In contacting Acer, it appears that Microsoft is no longer allowing them to sell a recovery disk for Windows XP. So, it appears I may just be out of luck.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get this thing working again? Any ideas appreciated. I hate to just junk this netbook when it was working great.

Thanks for the help.
Larry

 

Dropping the laptop probably damaged the hard drive heads and or platters which would require a professional recovery provider to extract any valuable data from the disc. If you have an extra drive or plan on installing a new one you can easily install a Linux OS on it. I run Fedora on my AAO's. I also would think that a more recent version of Windows would install if you would prefer that OS.

You can try a Live Linux distribution (distro) by installing one to a usb flash drive and booting that. The Fedora's installed on my AAO's were done from liveusb's using Fedora's LiveUSB Creator that works from Windows also and can run from the usb flash drive even with the hard drive removed.

phil

 

Thanks Phil. I don't have any data on there that I wanted to save, so that isn't a problem. My plan was to format the drive and let it fix the errors (as I think it is still usable), then reload something else.

The Fedora OS sounds interesting...I don't have much experience with it. I played with Ubuntu a few years back, but otherwise have no Linux experience. I'll take a look a that and see if it will work for me. Are you able to get the camera, etc. working under Fedora?

Thanks for the help.
Larry

 

The video camera works and can play all multimedia files after installing packages from a 3rd party repository which is easily done from following instructions on the fedoraforum site.

phil

 

There is Puppy Linux, that runs in RAM. This will allow you to try a file recovery. True, the OS might be dead, but certain sections with your files might still be readable. Xfer to a USB stick. Of course, doing that before lending sure looks like a good idea, should this happen again.

 

Thanks to everyone for your help. When I went to format the drive I confirmed that it was toast. I had another older laptop drive in the house, so I swapped it out and loaded up Fedora as Phil recommended. Everything worked perfectly and the netbook is usable again! Thanks again!