Recovery wont recover!! updated

Dear All

I promise I have tried multiple "fixes" from some of your excelelnt posts, but so far to no avail.

I have the ZG5, AOA-110 model Aspire One the one with the Linux (or is it Linpus) which now appears to be defunct and you have all been abandoning it in your droves as far as I can tell - would that I could but I cant.

To date I have successfully recovered it twice (in the past) using the USB drive with the Recovery Disc which came with it.

Recently Firefox started not opening when I clicked the icon.
So....I made a USB Recovery "thingy" again and went thro the recovery process to 100%, when I got a "Recovery did not work" message.

So now on start up, I get the Acer logo, with F2 F12 options (both work), then cut to:
L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 (for about ten lines worth down the screen), folowed by:

"Intel UNDI, PXE-2.1 (build 082)
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation

For Realtek RTL8101E/810E PCI-E Ethernet Controller v1.09 (080602)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.
No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key
_(flashing cursor)"

No key actually works at this point.

I tried searching this forum for these errors but got nothing. Another forum suggested it was the Hard Drive cable, that or slam the screen shut hard a couple of times first!! I cant tell you how vexed I was to take the whole damn thing apart to find - no HDD - apparently this model has solid state memory - who knew?!

So can anyone help. I need to recover from a failed recover! Most recent attempt was to put Linpuslite.iso on the USB and try that - no difference. No cables appeared to be loose when I was inside. My computer knowledge is fair to middling, but attemtps to try and get me to program with Linux may need proper baby steps. As far as I can tell the Master Boot Record may have become corrupt, so any way to deal with that would be appreciated if you know how, but dont recognise this problem. Finally I saw a post about running Check disk (or similar program) does anyone think that will a)run, b)help.

Looking forward to any help please at all.

Cheers

 

Re: Recovery wont recover!! update

So I have used LiLi (as Netbootin wot download no matter how hard I try today)
and created a USB with linpuslite on it - and when booting from USB I have NEWS!!

I dont get the L 99 99 happening, and my screen boots to what I assume is GRUB4DOS with a grub> (flashing cursor)

Any suggestions what I do next?

Anyone??

 

Final shout from me - as I managed to fix "the issue" so figured posting here may help others. Especially those like me who arent particularly Linux savvy.

Some things I learned:
Putting a disk image (file with .img or .iso) on a USB stick, does not make a bootable USB. For this you need UNetbootin - possibly, though it never downloaded for me for many mirror site, or I used LinuxLive USB creator. Awesome program, yo ujust download the OS yo uwant (as an img/iso file) and point the LiLi program to it and it will make you a bootable USB. Legend!

I booted up Ubuntu 9.04 - at the suggestion of other forum members (thanks), which helpfully got past my "no media" mesages and cleverly has a disk check option before loading, and the ability to run from the USB, which I figured was useful a) to see if it was any good, and b)let me see the actual Aspire was working, ie the media cables were not ACTUALLY the problem.

After a trial run on Ubuntu I decided to install it and now have a fully functional, tho a little slow Aspire One, which I suspect may be more "stable" than previously if the other forum posters are to be believed, and which may be able to run VLC etc. I also now have much more free space in the memory as Ubuntu only took up 2.1GB (approx).

Thats all from me - if you read this and want to ask questions then do as I should get an email notifying me. like Iam said Iam not an experty and manged this fix by reading many of the "recovery problem" posts and not from any specific advice from other members for my problem - so further advice from me is keep reading those old posts too, the answer may be there.

Cheers (if there is anybody actually out there!!?)

 

Actually, with Fedora and Mandriva (and possibly other distros), a straight-up copy ofthe iso file via dd to the USB stick will give you a bootable stick. Unfortunately, that doesn't work with Ubuntu (as you found out). If you're looking for something a bit lighter weight than the GNOME desktop, but still in the Ubuntu family, you might want to check out Xubuntu (which uses the XFCE desktop) and Lubuntu (which uses the LXDE desktop).