I recently bought my wife an Acer Aspire One AOA110-1295 Notebook PC for school. This little unit was really cheap and runs a weird version of Linux called Linpus.

Of course, I needed to mess around with it before I let her use it and, of course, I royally messed it up. I wasn’t too worried because it came with a recovery DVD that I could use to get it back to factory.

Unfortunately, when I went to build the recovery USB device, it failed. Now what?

Well, after some research and effort, I was able to build a new bootable USB device that allowed me to get the system back up and running.

Since I pieced the information and process together from a number of different sources and even used some new techniques myself, I figured that I should document the process and let everyone else know how I did this.

Step 1: Get Your Tools

In order to do this properly, you will need to download come tools from the Internet. You will need:

  1. 7-Zip (download)
  2. SelfImage (download)
  3. MD5 verification software (e.g. WinMD5Sum)

Download and install these applications.

You will also be needing a USB drive. I recommend something 4GB or larger.

Step 2: Download The Image

Next, you will have to download the drive image. It is available from here or you can get the torrent. Be aware that this is a very large file and is 958MB in size so it may take some time to download.

Also, download the MD5 hash file to confirm that the drive image has downloaded properly.

Step 3: Verify the Drive Image File

Once you have downloaded the drive image, make sure that the MD5 hash that you downloaded matches the one that you generated.

Step 4: Extract the Raw Image

Using 7-Zip, extract the raw image from the drive image that you downloaded.

Step 5: Write the Drive Image to the USB Drive

Using SelfImage, write the drive image to the USB drive. In order for this to work, you need to make sure that you are driving to the USB device, not the partition on the device. If you write to the partition, it will not work.

Wait for the process to finish prior to removing the USB drive.

Note: You will probably get a warning that the image was not made for the specific device. This is not a problem and you can continue to image the drive.

Step 6: Boot Aspire One from USB Device

On your Aspire One, put the newly created USB device into one of the USB ports. When it boots up to the BIOS, press F12 and select the USB device to boot from. This will then take you into the setup process where you can then work you way through rebuilding your Aspire One from scratch.

I hope that his has been a helpful tutorial and gets your Aspire One up and running again.

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Tim Fehlman