CoTD - ASUS Eee PC 1001PX Recovery Discs

Jabba the Hutt on 09/07/2010 - 21:33
Last edited 10/07/2010 - 10:11

Looking for some input from other people who took up the recent Eee PC 1001PX deal from Catch of the Day. Picked mine up from the post office this afternoon and it's been my date for the night. Started off well but things soon turned sour.

Because it seems there is no way to do a factory restore if the recovery partition is deleted or stops functioning.

  1. There are no recovery discs in the box.

  2. There's no installed utility for burning recovery discs, or any reference to the procedure in the documentation.

  3. After searching, I found reports ASUS is no longer including recovery discs or a recovery disc creation utility, but there's now an option to create a recovery USB stick in the F9 recovery console. However, that option doesn't appear on some models, and it seems this 1001PX is one of them.

According to one person who complained, ASUS's recommendation if you need to do a restore is to return the netbook to them. More information throughout this thread:

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20100429010016296&boa…

I don't consider this acceptable. What do others who've received this netbook think? I'll be giving ASUS a call on Monday to request a recovery disc and report back on whether they oblige.

General Discussion

Comments

  • scrimshaw on 09/07/2010 - 22:56

    Have you considered using a hard drive imaging tool?

    http://www.todo-backup.com/

  • Dr.Tenma on 10/07/2010 - 02:27

    Hi isnt this on the recovery partition, all you need to do is press f9 and follow the setup?

  • azndragon168 on 10/07/2010 - 22:15

    Yeah to recover, press F9 at startup as there is a hidden recovery partition.

    Another method, which is the option I took, was that I just made a ghost image after I've removed all the unwanted ASUS, Antivirus and office trial crap and installed all the latest windows updates so when it comes time to restore, I won't have to remove the crap again.

  • mutantx on 11/07/2010 - 02:24

    Acer netbook buyers confronted this same issue a year or two back .. the recovery software was on a dedicated proprietary partition .. if any attempt was made to fiddle with the setup or if there was some overall partition error then there was no way to restore from a non-existent BackupDisk, so to speak.
    The funniest and most irritating part was trying to explain this Disk lack to the phoneTech support people .. circuitous logic abounded to everyone's enduring frustration.
    Most people just chose to image the entire harddrive structure, including boot sectors and all relevant original settings, rather than try to explain to sales reps why the whole Recovery thing on the same disk as the puter was pretty stoopid.

    • Jabba the Hutt on 11/07/2010 - 11:14

      I saw a strange phenomenon in Amazon.com reviews where people who raised the issue were savaged and the reviews rated "helpful" where those which said "what are these people complaining about? you can recover from the hard disk, just leave that partition alone". So it's not just tech support that's clueless - seems a large part of the userbase also lacks the battle scars and foresight to appreciate why it's a problem.

      The trouble with imaging in this situation is it's a bit more hit and miss than OEM recovery discs, and you have to test it, which means simulate screwing up your partitions then do a test restore, with no second chance if it doesn't work. It's a catch 22. You must image and test restore to substitute for the lack of recovery discs, but it's unwise to do that without recovery discs to fall back on.

  • JudasX on 11/07/2010 - 15:40

    Please keep me updated. I received my asus yesterday too and noted the lack of a recovery disk. Quite annoyed about it.

    • cwongtech on 11/07/2010 - 16:13

      Lol, you guys with netbooks, get an 4GB usb and create a w7 bootable USB instead then? Iso downloadable freely off the net, just make sure you have a CD-Key that works?

    • Davo1111 on 11/07/2010 - 16:21

      just get a free hard drive imager… make a perfect image burn it to either usb or cd and leave it in a desk for safe keeping…

      i cant remember the name, just google "open source equivalent of acronis true image"

  • JudasX on 13/07/2010 - 11:02

    Hey guys,

    Do you know if there will be any problems with me installing Windows 7 or Office 2010 on this netbook?

    • I've heard that some netbooks cant run windows 7? and this one only came with XP.

    I was going to get win7 and/or office 2010, but figured I'd better ask here first..

    • azndragon168 on 13/07/2010 - 16:45

      There's no issue with Windows 7 except maybe sourcing drivers. If you go back to the original deal post, I remember seeing that someone had put Windows 7 on their netbook. If you need help, PM that user. Or better yet, Google. There's heaps of articles on the internet about installing Windows 7 on CD Drive-less computers.

      • Livert on 14/07/2010 - 18:36

        I used this app to make the bootable flash drive. http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool . Just download the windows 7 image anywhere and install with a valid key. Aero works surprisingly well but uses quite a chunk of ram. I recommend upgrading to 2gb.

        As for the drivers, you can get them all here. http://bit.ly/1001PX . I even updated the bios to 801.

        Have fun.

  • Jabba the Hutt on 13/07/2010 - 18:10

    Lodged support ticket with ASUS yesterday. Initial response received today contained instructions for creating a USB recovery disk, using the function that is missing from this system as noted above. Waiting for followup.

    What I imagine has happened is they made the sensible decision to switch from recovery discs to recovery USB sticks, but jumped the gun and withdrew recovery discs before all systems were shipping with the new recovery USB feature.

    • fenger on 21/10/2010 - 19:34

      What was the response you received?

  • arescarti42 on 15/07/2010 - 11:06

    I'd be interested to hear what the outcome is, whilst generally very pleased with the 1001px so far, I was pretty annoyed to see it didn't come with recovery disks, and thoroughly annoyed that it doesn't have a utility to make a recovery disk or recovery USB drive.

    I don't get it, it must cost Asus all of 20 cents to include a recovery DVD, why wouldn't they?

    • azndragon168 on 24/07/2010 - 11:31

      Because then users would call them stupid for providing a disc but no disc drive to put the disk in

  • bendertiger on 31/07/2010 - 20:12

    Now if you could just install a generic copy of Windows onto the machine you'd be set…I tried this on my Asus 10" EEE….and failed miserably. Never again! Buying an Acer Aspire One next time!

    • Livert on 01/08/2010 - 16:31

      I had no issues with mine. Where did you get stuck?

    • aussman on 01/08/2010 - 18:56

      had no probs installing generic copy of win 7 and win xp on eee just use bootable usb or external dvd drive and away you go

    • bendertiger on 01/08/2010 - 19:37

      Damn guys! I'm ex-comp tech, still have all the skills, just none of the passion. Damn thing kept locking up repeatedly on install. No matter what I used to get it going, USB stick or external dvd drive etc. Even got so desperate as to copy the Windows CD to the HD and then install it back into the EEE!

      I think it's got deep-seated issues, it's sitting under the bed gathering dust until I really take time to diagnose and repair it.

      • aussman on 03/08/2010 - 16:05

        its faulty then

      • Davo1111 on 22/10/2010 - 10:01

        well run ubuntu on it and check the disk and ram for errors. Format the disk completely as old installs can sometime affect it

  • Jabba the Hutt on 24/10/2010 - 20:41

    Just in response to fenger's bumping of the thread, the last reply I received from ASUS was:

    If there is no buckup option, I am afraid you have to call 1300 278788 between 9am-6pm Monday - Friday for further technical support. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

    Soon after I started this thread, I cloned the 1001PX's hard disk (MBR and all partitions) with EASEUS Todo Backup. However, to be extra careful, I tested the procedure on my MSI Wind netbook first - cloned the drive, installed Ubuntu over everything, then restored. It successfully returned everything (XP and recovery partition) to its previous state.

    But it didn't go quite so well for the 1001PX. After the restore, XP worked and the recovery partitions were there, but the recovery function was no longer accessible via the F9 key. The only way to boot into the recovery was to install Ubuntu, which set up Grub to recognise the recovery partition. Then I was able to test whether the built-in recovery function (it's based on Norton Ghost) would return the system to its original state so that F9 would work again. It didn't.

    In other words, I ran smack into the catch 22 I warned of in my second post above. And all the experimenting with cloning and restoring left me too weary to battle with ASUS over recovery discs. I don't have an immediate need for them, but the issue will probably come up again when it's time to sell the system and I have to somehow explain this crap in my item listing.

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