A friend of mine has given me her lovely pink Aspire One to try to recover after her brother managed to completely screw up a recovery attempt. When you turn it on, it immediately tries to 'resume' the previous XP recovery from the partitioned HDD, but comes unstuck as it can't find the ASMS folder on that partition (i'm presuming this was pre-installed from Acer?). So, i've copied an Acer Aspire One XP recovery disk onto a 1GB USB memory stick. I've formatted it as FAT32 using the 'HP USB disk storage format tool' to make the USB stick bootable. I've also put smartdrv on there too to speed up the installation. If I choose USB as the primary boot option it will start up and goes straight to the DOS prompt. I fire up smartdrv, then go into c:\I386 and execute WINNT.exe to kick off the recovery. At this point I get an error, it says I don't have enough space to install XP. I guess somehow it's ignoring the fact that the netbook has a HDD and is trying to install XP on the USB stick. I found the thread about recovering XP from a USB, but that thread had the pre-requisite that you could copy stuff onto the HDD of the netbook. I am unable to find the HDD from DOS when I boot off the USB, and without the USB, the XP recovery process automatically starts half way through. I tried pointing the XP recovery to the I386 folder on the memory stick (when booted from HDD), but I can't 'find' the USB, so am unable to do so. Does anyone have any ideas??
