Acer Aspire One 110 Recovery

Hello,

I have recently got an Acer Aspire One 110 Windows XP Version with 1GB ram for my girlfriend as an xmas present. Anyway while I was setting everything up for her i.e. firefox & msn etc. I spotted in the programs that there was nothing to do with Acer at all i.e. erecovery management, and the only thing was the Acer PDF manual. I then proceeded to look in disk management (right click my computer > manage) and to my shock there was no PQSERVICE or any sort of a recovery partition! The only partition was the main Windows partition! I thought maybe it was because the SSD hard disk is only 8GB. I decided to take a look at the 2 disk that I got supplied as I thought that these were the only possibe way to restore if you had an external disk drive. The 2 disk were labeled System CD & Windows XP Home Edition SP3, The System CD disk was 500MB in size and the Windows one was 2.54GB! That must be the recovery DVD then.

I decided to try and boot into the disks on my other laptop and the SystemCD disk did load up and it loaded the eRecovery program but the option to recovery was greyed out (fair enough as it was a different laptop) I then decided to boot the 2.54GB Windows disk and the laptop would not recognise it at all! I decided to look at the contents of the 2.54GB Windows disk manually through windows and all that it has it about 20 .SWM files and some other files but the only application I could see was a program called "ImageX" I then manually looked at the contents of the SystemCD disk and there was only various folders and files but no clickable applications. I am now a bit confused by these 2 disks, how am I supposed to do a full restore the aspire one now incase anything goes wrong?? Could anyone help me out with how am I supposed to these 2 disk or am I supposed to create another recovery disk using these 2 original disks? Or will these 2 disk boot up fine using an external disk drive with the aspire one??

I hope you all can understand my problem lol thanks all - Liam

 

What are you doing there, is a back door entrance ...

Read the user manual of the Netbook for more info .

 

Sorry, I also forgot to mention.

I did read the manual - the manual states that there should be the erecovery program on there & the ALT + F10 function on the BIOS should work.. and it doesnt because of no recovery partition present. I have also spoke to Acer in the last couple of days about this as well regarding the recovery partition. The first guy I spoke to suggested that my unit might be faulty and that I would need to send it back to them to put the recovery partition back on, I said I would ring them back. I rang them back the next day and the second guy I spoke to seemed to be more knowledgable with Aspire One's and he indeed confirmed that the 8GB SSD Aspire One's do not come with the erecovery program & the recovery partition because of the size of the SSD hard disk and the 2 disks should both work and the Windows XP one is the main recovery disk and to try the 2 disks in another machine to see if they both work - that is what I did. Any more ideas?

Thanks - Liam

 

hook up an external optical drive. boot to the system CD and let the program launch. It will then ask for the recovery DVD, load the files, and then may ask for the system CD to copy a few files over.

Once done, it will boot right back up like when you bought it. You will need to run the XP setup and off you go.

 

I also have an A110.

What I do is use Clonezilla (free software, you can boot it off a USB flash drive) to make image backups of the entire 8 GB ssd to an external USB hard-drive/flash drive. Later on, I can restore those images if needed and go back to the system as it was when I made the backup.

This way, there's no need for any hidden partitions taking up any precious space. With 8 GB, there's little room to waste space.

P.S. Making a bootable USB flash drive that boots Clonezilla is as easy as:
1. formatting that flash drive clean to FAT32
2. extracting the clonezilla clonezilla-live-1.2.2-26.zip (or newer) file into your flash drive
3. running utils/win32/makeboot.bat from your flash drive

 

Thanks for that, I take it that the 2 disks will solely boot up on aspire one's only? Hence that they would not boot up on my other laptop just to test them out?

Thanks - Liam

 

The numerous .SWM files are actually a split .WIM file. If the recovery process boots into a Windows PE 2.0 or later environment, you may be able to place it in a bootable USB flash drive and recover from there. Note that a 4GB flash drive will be required.

 

Thanks, I have already read up on the Microsoft ImageX dos program used to create & mount images. I have just downloaded a graphic version of the program called GImageX. Going to try it out tomorrow and see if I have any luck with it.

Thanks again - Liam

 

Clonezilla will not restore the MBR if image stored in other media than the original HDD .

This detail that lots software miss out , forced me to buy Acronis Disk Director 10.

True Clonezilla link .. http://clonezilla.org/

 

Right I have managed to extract all of the .SWM files into a new folder and when the extracting finished, inside the folder just looked like the contents of a typical C: drive. Which basically means there must be a way to be able to copy the files over onto the Aspire One's 8GB SSD and maybe upon a reboot it will boot into the new Windows normally & setup?

Liam

 

You probably have to use "imagex.exe /apply" and designate the 8GB SSD as the destination.
I don't know how you would do it with GImageX though.

 

Oh right ok, I've just managed to get around imagex. The only thing that I am a bit puzzled with is how to mount all the .SWM images together in one command & then export to .WIM, does anyone know the command to export all of the various .SWM files together in the imagex command?

Thanks - Liam

 

To merge the .SWM files, you will need to use the following command.

imagex /ref source*.swm /check /export source.swm 1 target.wim

Blue - Change to reflect your specific .SWM files
Red - If applicable, you may need to change to select a different image inside the .SWM files.

 

Thanks a lot, managed to mount them together into one large .WIM file now! IS there any particular way I can extract the .WIM say like on a DVD or directly on the Aspire One Hard Disk?

Thanks again - Liam

 

You can apply the WIM image with the following command.

imagex.exe /apply D:\ boot.wim 1 C:\

Green - Change to reflect the WIM image path.
Orange - Change to reflect WIM image file name.
Purple - I'm assuming it's a WIM with only one image.
Cyan - Change to reflect the internal SSD drive letter.

 

Thats for the command! One last question - when can I apply lol command lol obviously I can't run it in DOS and would it be best to apply the image using that ERD commander boot program and then run cmd imagex through it?

Thanks again - Liam