Acer Aspire 1 freezing on startup - will my "solution" work?

I've just bought two Acer Aspire Ones (with the 120GB disk) for my sons.

I've been busily downloading games from Add / Remove Programs over the last few days. One of the Acers is fine, but the other just gets to the blue screen (with logo) and proceeds no further. I think it could be that battery was low, and it shut down mid-way through updates.

Anyway, I can't seem to find a way of breaking out of this.

I see two possible solutions.

The ideal would be to do a copy of the one that works straight on to the other, then I have exact same set up. I aim to achieve this by installing rsync, backing up, and restoring on non-working machine.

But I presume for this to work, the non-working machine needs to have rsync installed too.

So, do I reinstall from recovery first, then install rsync, then do the restore?

Alternatively, I do recovery, and then do all the installs manually.

However, to do recovery, ideally I need a USB optical drive (which I haven't got!). But, can I just copy files from disc to usb drive and then boot from that?

Thanks in advance!

 

The easiest way to accomplish this would be to use an external usb drive - either a hard drive or a flash key. Install something like sysrescuecd on the first partition of that drive and create a second partition to hold a backup.

The first thing I'd do is boot the bad computer using the sysrescuecd key and run fsck on the computer's hard drive. It sounds like it's filesystem corruption that is preventing the system from booting. If a fsck doesn't fix the problem, then you could move on to the next step, which would be using that key/hdd to backup the good computer, then simply restore that image to the bad computer.

All this could be done with the backup solution that I offer on my blog, or if you want to create the whole thing yourself, you can find instructions in this thread ...

http://aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopi ... 17&start=0

Cheers.

 

Thanks for your answer - I'll give it a try!

 

All sorted and OK now - thanks!

 

Just signing in to say mine did the same, the battery was low when email was open, must have died while I was in the shower, now wont go past the blue Aspire One screen, maybe this is going to be a recurring issue?

Will just make a USB recovery disc I think, wont lose anything too valuable since I've only had it two days!

 

Maybe on the basis of our two submissions, yes!

The Recovery disk worked absolutely fine - the only thing is I need to d/l all the updates again!

 

Perhaps your machine is not really frozen? If the machine didn't do a clean shutdown previously, then it might be running "fsck" at startup, while the splash screen is displaying. Is the disk light blinking? If so give it several minutes to allow fsck to finish and it might recover all by itself.

 

Been tried, the disc light is just plain on, not just blinking and the machine sounds like it's trying hard to do something. Eventually it just goes black and needs turning off.

 

Just noticed the post about clean shutdown, and I think that is the answer, as we've seen it happen again.

If you just leave the machine, it reboots and then starts normally. Takes a while, but does work!

 

Yep - I'd actually arranged for a return for my laptop after it 'froze' on the blue start-up screen.

By the time I'd finished on the phone arranging the pick-up to send it back, the thing was working perfectly - and has been ever since.