How do I recover from CD without CD drive?

Hello! And thank you for this forum! While I am fairly proficient with computers, these netbooks are a whole new animal. I've had my Acer for about 4 days.

Here is my problem: My Aspire One came without the Acer recovery software, and when I click on "system restore" XP tells me that it has been disabled. I check the box to enable it, and get an error message saying that it "encountered a problem" (which is about as revealing as when a guy says "it's not you, it's me") and that I should restart my computer, which I have tried, but it doesn't work. (Again, strangely like a relationship!)

It came with two disks, one entitled "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition SP3" and the other "For Distribution Only with a New Acer PC". I would dearly love to reinstall with nothing but the Windows XP, since removing pre-loaded programs is what might have caused the recovery file corruption problem in the first place. On a regular computer, the recovery CD is a bootable disk with the CD hardware driver installed on it so that the computer can actually use the CD to install the software, but since I am using an independent external CD drive, whose drivers wouldn't be on the recovery CD, how does this work? Does the netbook store the necessary driver on the "D" SD Card before formatting the C? I want to know for sure before I try anything.

Secondly, when I take the SD card out of the D drive and put it in my desktop, it says there is an I/O problem and freezes the desktop. Is this normal? And what the devil is on there, anyway? There is a folder entitled "SMRTNTKY", and files entitled Autorun and setupSNK. If at some point I want to put a bigger card in this slot, does it need this stuff?

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

Heidi
Eugene, Oregon, USA

 

You shouldn't have to restore from CD. You should have a program called "erecovery" that will restore the factory image or repair drivers. It should be under the start menu and "Acer Empowering Technology". You may have to enable D2D in BIOS but it doesn't say anything about that part in the manual. Can anyone touch up on that last part for me?

 

I looked and looked, and finally emailed Acer tech support. It turns out that they don't install the erecovery program if they include recovery discs. The trouble is, the manual doesn't make this distinction, and the customer wastes time and energy (as well as the forum's energy!) trying to find something that doesn't exist. They could have included a one sheet explanation, but there was nothing in the box saying that part of the manual was wrong.

At this point, I am not a very happy Acer customer.

Heidi

 

Hmmm...

Well, I have some IDE adapters where you could plug in a CD or DVD drive via USB. I got them for $10 from newegg and they even have a power supply. I purchased them for the power supply actually and decided to give up on the project (I was trying to convert an old imac to an external monitor but just purchased a new monitor ).

I paid $9.99 for them. If you want one, let me know and we can make a deal with paypal

 

Thanks Garrett! But I finally got it up and running! I'm going to start a new post explaining everything I had to do, in case others have this same problem. Heidi

 

Excellent. the post would be a great idea too.

I tried one of the little IDE-USB converters on a CD drive last night and it works just fine. $10 for the adapter and Everyone should have an IDE optical drive laying around or at least in a PC. Beats what an external USB drive costs for the actual amount you need it

 

This exceeds the limits of my computing knowledge! How does this work? Since I have an older external drive that works fine once the recovery is completed, I plan on returning the $100 new external CD drive that worked with the recovery disks. However, I don't really want to (nor do I think it is right) to buy/use/return a new external drive if I ever need to recover again.

Is there a way to backup my current hardrive to thumb drive, desktop link, or SD card, with everything just the way I want it and working perfect, so that it can be returned to this state in the event of a crash?

Heidi

 

You know what, I have never tried backing up to a thumb drive or SD card. I do not see why that wouldn't work though.

Personally I only back up files. I never do a system restore or system backup. If there is a problem with the Winblows install, I simply re-install the OS with a fresh copy on a full formatted drive (or partition).

The best way to do a complete perfect backup though would require two hard drives and make a mirror image of the main drive. I do this for business customers. Once the OS and all the programs are installed and all updates completed, I will boot to DOS and make a complete image to a spare drive. Then I remove the spare drive and keep it on a shelf . That would be harder to do in the AA1 but possible.

As for the extrenal drive. Let me check tonight if I can boot to CD from the setup I have (USB adapter). I will let you know once I try. As it is though, this setup could be used to back up the system to CD or even an IDE DVD Burner.

 

I was able to boot to CD-Rom with the $9 USB to IDE adapter from newegg.com. I first went into BIOS and changed the boot order. I did not check with simply hitting F12. I like the BIOS solution better

 

So, as I understand you, this $9 doohicky can link my AA1 to my HP desktop, then I can put the recovery CD in the desktop and boot the AA1 to that in order to do the reinstall? Sign me up! Do you have an item number I could search for at Newegg, just to make sure I get the exact right thing?

Heidi

 

This device is to hook up a CD or DVD Rom taken out of a desktop PC. It is not to hook up to a desktop PC. Below is a link to the item.

If you have ever replaced your Optical drive in your desktop it was probably connected via an IDE cable. This is the flat grey cable (hard drives where connected this way too known as IDE or Parallel ATA [PATA]). If you have one of these drives laying around it is a simple hook up and runs perfectly via USB at bootup.

If you do not have a spare ATA drive you can get just a cheap one at any 2nd hand computer store for probably $10. And at last resort, you could take the one out of your desktop (as long as it is PATA and not SATA like some new computers).

Regardless, it would be a lot cheaper then buying an external drive that is not used that often. And in a pinch, taking one out of a desktop would not too terribly bad.

If you don't have a spare drive, I will make you a deal . I have an extra USB to IDE adapter and I am sure I have spare drives, probably even a CDRW drive so you could even do backups. We could do a deal for both and call it $25 shipped .

LINK IS HERE

 

Ok, this is kind of cool. Searching around I found an old 10gb Hard drive and hooked it up. I download Maxtor tools and made an exact image of my AA1 hard drive and now I can boot from the USB to windows. This is slow of course but the point being that I now have an exact image of the drive in my AA1. If I ever have problems with Windows I can just copy this image to the HD in my AA1 and be back to the point of where I am now. This is A LOT better then windows restore point .

Oddly enough though, I cannot get the adapter to work with any IDE laptop drives I have laying around probable a power issue. The adapter does come with power for an IDE hard drive or desktop drive but not for a laptop drive

 

Thanks for explaining about ide-usb convertors - I had wondered what people were talking about when they said they hooked their HDD or CD up to the AA1 - Maplin do one here in UK - A25AT - £5 off this month.

 

Hi, first post here.
Ritmo makes a USB-to-IDE adaptor which consists of a 3-way plug (PATA/SATA and 2.5"laptop PATA) to USB2.
Comes with its own power-pack to drive standard 4-pin connectors on all PATA drives and a Sata adaptor-cable.

With this kit I've booted the little Acer to a 120g notebook drive...320g 3.5" SATA harddisk...an old 48x CDrom, a Pioneer 112 DVD (IDE) and a Pioneer 116 DVD (SATA).
In some cases it took a little while as the drives were quite large and full of data, but boot in the end it did.

The kit cost me ~Aussie$ 30 some months ago and has proven invaluable since.

 

Hi glitz_oz
Welcome aboard!
Is that the RITMO R-Driver USB 2.0 to SATA / IDE Cable at http://www.crazysales.com.au/index.php?productID=2393 /
You using Windows? I've got Linpus and there seems to be a problem with these things with Linux
Is there any documentation? Does it say anything about Linux?
My Linux reads XP usb sticks, so why not XP HDD?

 

Thanks buddy
That's the one!
Lin/Win got nothing to do with what the machine boots up on and recognizes, use Bios and/ or Bootmenu for that.
Once it comes to the from-scratch- install from any of those external drives, thinghs might be different.
In that case it's Win, yes.
Using Ghost for any overwrites...Ghost also hasn't shown any probs with recognizing any of those external drives used.
Therefore I can't see a problem re-loading from a Linux- image file.

I also made a ghost-image file booting onto a usb-stick and writing the image to a USB-cardreader with an old 1G CF card in it.
Another image (booted from USB stick) to the SATA 320g HDD via the above Ritmo gear.

 

Here is a few pics of my AA1 as the worlds smallest desktop

 

Very Cool! What do you call it? Franken-book? "It's alive! It's ALIVE!!!!"