Had a preinstalled Acer Aspire One 150 and was not provided the recovery cd. This product is been provided a “Disk to Disk” recovery option by the manufacture. What I wanted t do is actually keep the original copy of the installation and reinstall a clean Window XP home on to the netbook to get rid of all the garbage application which came with the installation.
I use the Acronis True Image Home 10.0 edition and perform backup image on another external hard drive. Upon finishing the task I went ahead formating the drive and install the netbook. Once I started installing a message prompted me that the hard drive cannot be formated and had to end the installation.
I then boot up my system with the Acronis to restore the image copy which was saved earlier. Halfway restoring Acronis prompted that the archive is corrupted and the restored is incomplete. Both partition cannot be salvaged any more. What a disappointment I felt after all the hard work done prepping the system.
I sat down and try to recall what when wrong, and came to remember that I had made the backup image under maximum compression to save space and I didn’t validated the image is useable before formating my HDD. Luckily the image stii can be browse through and manage to copy the I386 folder and the oem* files from the C:/windows/../I386.
Look up the internet to read on how to recreate an OEM Window XP from a pre-installed systems, and from what I gather the easiest way is to use nLite. I read the nlite faq and guides, and go ahead with the process. I also slipstream IE7, SP3 and motherboard drivers on to the installation cd.
However, upon completing the installation my windows XP home still require me to activate my windows. I have read in some forums that OEMs installation should not have the activation process since it has been pre-registered. I have no choice and turn to Crack friend and stop the activation, (although I am the original user on the original netbook).
Moral of the story…. always check, confirm and validate your backups regularly before over writing or wiping of your HDD. To Acer, they should have included the recovery DVD on together with the hardware….
