{"id":250,"date":"2008-12-11T01:31:55","date_gmt":"2008-12-11T05:31:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/?p=250"},"modified":"2008-12-11T01:31:55","modified_gmt":"2008-12-11T05:31:55","slug":"making-a-restore-disk-for-the-acer-aspire-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/programmer\/making-a-restore-disk-for-the-acer-aspire-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Making a &#8216;Restore Disk&#8217; for the Acer Aspire One"},"content":{"rendered":"<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/res\/images\/acer_aspire_one.jpg\" alt=\"Acer Aspire One\" class=\"right\"\/><p>We just picked up a little Acer Aspire One netbook. We&#8217;re pretty happy with it so far (except we&#8217;ll be exchanging it for a new one since the &#8216;p&#8217; key on this one only works half the time). I&#8217;ll probably do a more in depth review once we&#8217;ve used it a bit but it certainly is tiny and handy. The only major drawback is the tiny mousepad. Anyway, it doesn&#8217;t come with a system restore or Windows disk. I realize there&#8217;s a hidden partition on the hard drive but I don&#8217;t really like trusting a single hard drive. Google didn&#8217;t turn up any really handy answers for how to make a system restore disk from a hidden partition or an entire install (especially onto a USB hard drive) using free software so I thought I&#8217;d document what I ended up coming with. I have no idea if this is the smartest\/safest way to do this and I&#8217;d recommend getting Norton Ghost or something similar if you don&#8217;t feel confident with any of the processes in here.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>There&#8217;s two steps to the process, making a USB drive into a little bootable linux system and backing up the partitions onto a USB hard drive.<\/p> \r\n<h3>Things You&#8217;ll Need<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>Some annoying computer with no backup\/restore CD<\/li>\r\n<li>USB Key Disk<\/li>\r\n<li>USB Harddrive<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>I think you could actually just do this with a single harddrive or a really big USB key if you made it into 2 partitions (the SystemRescueCD OS doesn&#8217;t save changes by default). <\/p>\r\n<h3>Making a bootable linux USB disk<\/h3>\r\n<p>I used <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sysresccd.org\/Main_Page\">SystemRescueCD<\/a> for my linux system (although I suppose any small distribution with the appropriate tools would work). Obviously a CD does not do a lot of good when you have a laptop without a CD player but luckily (the somewhat misnamed) SystemRescueCD can be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sysresccd.org\/Sysresccd-manual-en_How_to_install_SystemRescueCd_on_an_USB-stick\">installed to a USB drive<\/a>. As documented on that page, you&#8217;ll need to download the .iso from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sysresccd.org\/Download\">SystemRescueCD<\/a> site and move most of the files from the .iso to your USB drive. If you don&#8217;t already have a handy way to mount an .iso and don&#8217;t feel like burning a CD, I had decent luck with <a href=\"http:\/\/download.microsoft.com\/download\/7\/b\/6\/7b6abd84-7841-4978-96f5-bd58df02efa2\/winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.exe\"> Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel<\/a> or if you&#8217;re using Linux just a simple <code>mount -o loop disk.iso \/some\/empty\/folder<\/code> (although for some strange reason I had trouble getting a Linux-made version working). Once you&#8217;ve copied the files from the CD and ran <code>syslinux<\/code> as directed, you should have a handy USB key that will boot a computer into linux (if you set the BIOS to boot from USB).<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h3>Backing Up Partitions<\/h3>\r\n<p>Once you&#8217;ve got your little USB linux, you&#8217;ll want to look at Lifehacker&#8217;s handy <a href=\"http:\/\/lifehacker.com\/software\/geek-to-live\/partition-and-image-your-hard-drive-with-the-system-rescue-cd-292972.php\">walkthrough to SystemRescueCD<\/a>. Replace all mentions of CD with USB disk and instead of backing up to the same hard drive, we&#8217;ll back up to an additional USB hard drive.<\/p>\r\n<p>Now from here on out, you&#8217;ll want to be very careful. Things should be (mostly) safe but messing around with partitions is getting towards the more touchy end of computing. I&#8217;d back up anything important to a separate harddrive. After that, here we go:<\/p>\r\n<ol>\r\n<li>Turn off your computer, stick in your USB key drive (not the USB hard drive yet) and press &lt;F12&gt; on startup to set the BIOS to boot from the USB<\/li>\r\n<li>The SystemRescueCD OS should come up. Hit return at <code>boot:<\/code> and pick the appropriate keyboard type if it asks.<\/li>\r\n<li>Once the <code>root@sysresccd \/root %<\/code> prompt comes up, run <code>partimage<\/code>. Look through the list of partitions. You should see an approximately 5 GiB partition (the hidden restore partition), the big main partition about the size of your harddrive and a small partition about the size of your USB disk. Write down which is which. On my Acer Aspire One, the hidden partition shows up as fat32 on <code>sda1<\/code>, the main windows partition as ntfs on <code>sda2<\/code> and my USB disk plugged in the left USB port as sdb1. Exit <code>partimage<\/code> by pressing &lt;F6&gt;.<\/li>\r\n<li>Plugin in your USB harddrive. Wait a couple seconds. Start <code>partimage<\/code> again and you should see a new partition appear that&#8217;s the size of your USB harddrive. Write it down. On the AAO, the close right USB port comes up as <code>sdc1<\/code>. Also note if the harddrive is <code>ntfs<\/code>. Exit again with &lt;F6&gt;.<\/li>\r\n<li>Move to the <code>mnt<\/code> directory (<code>cd \/mnt<\/code>). Make a new directory named myusb (<code>mkdir myusb<\/code>). Now mount the USB harddrive (connect it to the folder we just made). If your harddrive is <code>ntfs<\/code> then do <code>ntfs-3g \/dev\/[insert USB harddrive partition] \/mnt\/myusb<\/code>, otherwise type <code>mount \/dev\/[your USB harddrive&#039;s partition goes here] \/mnt\/myusb<\/code>. In my case, this was <code>mount \/dev\/sdc1 \/mnt\/myusb<\/code>. <\/li>\r\n<li>Make a directory somewhere convenient on the backup harddrive (in <code>\/mnt\/myusb<\/code>). I did <code>mkdir \/mnt\/myusb\/backup<\/code>. Write down the full path for this directory.<\/li>\r\n<li>Start <code>partimage<\/code> (last time this time). Select either the main Windows partition or the hidden partition you want to backup, press &lt;Right&gt;, enter <code>\/mnt\/myusb\/backup\/partbak<\/code> in the &#8220;Image file to create\/use&#8221; box. Hit &lt;F5&gt; to go to the next screen and &lt;F5&gt; again to accept the default options (gzip the image files and split into 2 Gb files). Enter a descriptive description and hit Return (twice) to go to the next screen. Take a quick glance at the information and hit &lt;Right&gt; and Return again to start the backing up.<\/li>\r\n<li>Get a coffee or two and wait until it finishes. Exit. Shutdown the computer. Remove the USB drives. Restart in Windows, plug in the USB harddrive and make sure the drives contains a backup folder with <code>partbak.000<\/code>\u00ef\u00bc\u0152<code>partbak.001<\/code>&#8230; inside. If so, congratulations.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<p>Geez that ended up going longer than I thought but that should be it. Now if worse comes to worse, you can do the reverse to restore (hopefully). I&#8217;ve only tried restoring once but it&#8217;s one for one so far.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We just picked up a little Acer Aspire One netbook. We&#8217;re pretty happy with it so far (except we&#8217;ll be exchanging it for a new one since the &#8216;p&#8217; key on this one only works half the time). I&#8217;ll probably do a more in depth review once we&#8217;ve used it a bit but it certainly [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[399,392,394,396,393,397,395,401,400,398],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions\/283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}