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1. 

   Posted by: acher dude
   Member

   After several months of faithful use, a windows automatic update seems to have killed my aspire one. After the update hung for about 5 hours my wife powered the netbook down and now it is stuck in an endless loop of checking the disk followed by a Blue Screen of Death when trying to start the OS. Safe Mode won't load either.

   I figure I'll have to recover the OS.

   I don't have a USB Opitical Drive, so I found the 'The Acer Guy's' helpful video and thought, "Perfect!" I'll use that method to create a USB recovery drive from the recovery DVD.

   Only, I don't have the same recovery DVD as shown in the tutorial. I have 2 CDs. One is XP home edition. The other is a disk labeled 'System CD: Rev2.0'.

   If I pop the recovery CD in a pc with an optical drive, it boots off the disk and loads a recovery utility but it's not the same application as in the tutorial. It's much more rudimentary and the menu lists 2 options. Recover system or exit. I try the recover option and it warns me that the system will be recovered and my c:/ volume will be wiped out. No options to create a USB recovery device. Not quite what I want.

   For fun I tried using HP USB utility to format my USB drive and then I copied the contents of the system disk to my USB drive but it's still not bootable (which is what I suspected would happen).

   If anyone can suggest how to copy the contents of the recovery disk and make it bootable I would be very appreciative. The other option is to follow some of the examples online of how to install XP from a USB, but it seems like the recovery disk would be better since it should already have all the drivers I'm going to need following an XP install.

   As a side note, I've also tried hitting alt-f10 several times as my netbook starts up to no avail.

   Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

   Acher Dude

   Posted 1 year ago #
2. 

   Posted by: RimmerUK
   Member

   Only the linux version of the A110/150 models had the option of creating a USB memory stick, the XP versions are disk only as far as i know.

   Posted 1 year ago #
3. 

   Posted by: Slipster101
   Member

   What HDD is in the netbook ? 8GB SSD, 16GB SSD, 120GBSata, 160GB Sata ?

   Different HDD's in this model range require different ways of installing windows.

   Posted 1 year ago #
4. 

   Posted by: acher dude
   Member

   It's got an 8GB SSD.

   Posted 1 year ago #
5. 

   Posted by: acher dude
   Member

   Following the advice of a tutorial for installing windows XP from a USB drive I attempted to use the wintoflash utility to create an USB XP install drive.

   Unfortunately I couldn't get past the first steps of the wizard as it asks for a source for windows files and the utility would not accept either of the DVDs that came with my netbook as viable sources.

   At this point, I'm not sure what to do. I really don't want to drop $40-$50 dollars to buy a USB DVD drive, that I'm only going to use to recover my netbook.

   Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

   Posted 1 year ago #
6. 

   Posted by: acher dude
   Member

   Update:
   I've tried to create a bootable USB XP Installation drive with a couple different utilities following various online tutorials. I seem to get stuck in the same place every time. The utilities I'm using require XP setup source files.

   I've tried using both DVD's that came with my acer (one labeled 'System CD: Rev2.0 Support for these products provided by Acer Inc. for NAND flash module only' and the other labeled 'English for PA Only: Rev2.0 support for these products provider by Acer Inc. Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition SP3 For Distribution Only With a New Acer PC') to no avail.

   I've tried pointing the USB build utilities to every single folder on both cd's hoping to find the required XP source files, but alas, no dice. The source files aren't present (or are in some format unusable by the utilities trying to build the USB install drive).

   At this point I'm willing to give up on XP and install linux from USB, but I fear that the linux distribution may not work with my particular model.

   Still hoping someone out there can give me some direction.

   Posted 1 year ago #
7. 

   Posted by: AcerInsider
   Member

   Acer recovery disks are not like retail copies of an operating system disk and as such will not contain the source files you are looking for. It makes a direct copy to the drive and does not do a normal install of the operating system.

   Posted 1 year ago #
8. 

   Posted by: EddieRock
   Member

   Did you ever figure out how to build a USB boot disk to partition your disk and reinstall your Windows XP on your Acer Aspire One zg5?

   I’ve been trying to install XP from USB and/or use the recovery CD that came with the laptop to restore the hard disk to factory xp install...

   All else fails, I'll try to get Ubuntu 10.10 to run on it but all I get is a blinking cursor in the corner after install. Anyone know where I can download the factory Linux install for this laptop? I'll go with that on my 8GB SSD drive... XP is soooooo slow I can feel myself getting old watching it.

   Any guidance would be helpful

   Posted 1 year ago #
9. 

   Posted by: Peter
   Moderator

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBuCH-HgZY0

   How to create a bootable USB thumbdrive

   Posted 1 year ago #

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