Recovery Help

Hi, I'm pretty sure the answers I'm looking for have not been posted yet, or at least spelled out to the degree that I need it.

I ran the live update function on my (un-messed with except to install skype) acer last night and it failed, giving me an error message that I don't remember. This morning when I tried to boot up the computer it asked for a boot device or something to that effect, so I guess I need to run the recovery disc.

Questions part I
I'm in India on vacation and have all my important (and stupidly un-backed up) travel photos on the computer; are they toast, or is there something I can do to somehow save them before I use the recovery disc and lose all info? I have an 8 gig memory card plugged into the expansion slot, what are the chances that when I saved the photos they ended up on the card instead of the hard drive, and are therefore safe?

Questions part II
I didn't make a thumb drive copy of the recovery disc before I left on vacation, but I brought the DVD. Now I'm at a net cafe trying to figure out how to do it and having a hard time. I plug in the DVD and thumb drive, restart and go to the BIOS setup and follow Acer's directions to set up the 1st boot device as the DVD, and then save and exit and allow the computer to boot up. It then boots as normal into windows, and that's it. I don't get it, is it supposed to be booting into Linux? My instruction sheet says to make a selection from a list of options at this point, but there is no such list.

What am I doing wrong? Please help, I'm a long way from home and possible help with this, and I'm not particularly computer literate (I had to google what in the hell BIOS was and how to get there!).

Thanks,
Andy

 

What system are/were you running on your AA1? What is the hardware configuration of your AA1? If you can access a computer with an SD reader then you can remove the SD card and insert it into the other computers SD card reader to see what data is on it then copy it. This would allow you to keep your data.

 

Sorry, my system is running the standard linpus Linux, and it is the 512mb memory model. I haven't come across another card reader yet, but am looking for one. If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know. Thanks,
-Andy