Reinstalling Windows XP on an Acer Aspire One with Linux on it
About a year ago I got myself an Acer Aspire One, because it had a keyboard I could touch-type on normally. I got a Windows XP version although I was only planning to run Linux on it, because I could only get a Linux powered one with an 8 GB SSD. I thought that was a little small for my needs.
When I installed Linux I'd made sure to leave the restore partition alone, I might need it if I wanted Windows XP again. No install disk was provided. Fair enough, the device doesn't even have a drive for it, but what if I wanted to run Windows and install a bigger hard drive?
It was time to restore Windows. I also wanted to keep running Linux on it, so I backed up my home dir and ran the restore program. This was easy, it was an option in my Linux bootloader, which thought the restore partition was a Windows 2000/NT install. However it didn't work because it expected the partions right how they were before I installed Linux.
So I fired up a live Linux USB drive (Ubuntu 9.10) and changed the partitions. You can use something like Gparted for this, it's on most live distributions. Then the bootloader didn't work any more, so I couldn't start the restore option. What you usually do is grab your Windows install disk and use the recovery console's Here's what I did to fix everything:
- Make sure the partitions are set up correctly. In my case this meant having the restore partition first, and all the remaining space was one fat32 partition. I formatted it fat32 just in case, but I'm not sure this step is required. Also make sure the first partition is set to bootable.
- Then I needed to set up the MBR so it would boot into the restore partition. For this
you use the program
install-mbr. I had to dosudo aptitude install mbrbefore I could do this. - I used the command
sudo install-mbr -i n -p D -t 0 /dev/sdato fix the mbr:-i n(do not display a menu)-p D(start the system by loading the partition that has the bootable flag set)-t 0(timeout before booting is 0)/dev/sda(The drive to install the MBR on, in this case/dev/sda, the only hard drive on the system.
- You will now be able to boot into the restore program, and restore Windows. Once the system
reboots, you'll get the restore program again and again. You can use
install-mbrwith different options to make the Windows partition the bootable partition, but since I'm going to install Linux on this, which has it's own boot menu facilities, there's no need. - The final task is to install Linux. I used Kubuntu 9.10 which allowed me to resize the Windows partition without destroying it, as part of its installation process. Once the install was finished, I got a nice boot menu offering Linux, Windows XP, and the restore program, called something like "Windows NT/2000". Note that the restore program won't work until you reset the partitions to their factory state like I explained above.