recovery disks not working after installing Debian

I bought an Aspire E360 a couple months ago and finally got around to
putting Linux on it.

I did my best to make the new partition layout "recovery
disk-friendly". I deleted the C: partition and created a new C:
partition half its former size to make room for linux, and left drive
D: alone. Linux went on just fine, I used Debian 3.1r4 etch. (3.1r3
didn't recognize the hard disk or ethernet card.)

Then I used the recovery disks to put on a clean install of Windows.
The recovery went fine until the very end. When I put the system disk
back in, it says "copying files" and the progress bar goes to 40%, then
hangs. I tried rebooting, the windows image does not work.

The original drive configuration was

- active primary partition (hidden, approx. 5GB)
- extended partition
- logical partition (drive C
- primary partition (drive D

After installing linux, it looks like

- active primary partition (hidden, approx. 5GB)
- extended partition
- logical partition (drive C
- Linux root partition (/)
- Linux swap
- primary partition (drive D

system info

Aspire E360-UA381M
system disk for Aspire 3000/5000 series P/N: SD.A5103.002
3 recovery disks for Aspire 3000/5000 series P/N: RD.A5107.023

By the way I noticed the recovery disks say XP Pro, the system shipped
with XP multimedia.

You should have gone to the Acer support site and read about their recovery
system before you started.

Acer uses an cheesy recovery system that depends on Ghost for drive imaging
and expects to see the same size partition as the image was generated from.
If it is not the same, it won't work. Also, once you change anything in the
way Acer put it together, the eRecovery will not work as originally shipped.
I have had to use Partition Magic to change the hidden partition to an
active partition and back again to just get the hidden partition to do its
wonders since I messed with mine. You'd have been better off modifying the
D drive than the C because eRecovery uses the D drive as a data drive and
does not care what happens to it as long as it can do its backups et al onto
it. Then you could have done another image to the D drive and it would have
worked fine. I have an Aspire 5102 and installed XP Pro x64 on it using the
D drive, leaving the C drive as originally configured. No problems other
than what I created in the beginning when I messed with the C drive.

Ernie from Kansas City, Kansas, USA

"D" wrote in message
oups.com...
I bought an Aspire E360 a couple months ago and finally got around to
putting Linux on it.

I did my best to make the new partition layout "recovery
disk-friendly". I deleted the C: partition and created a new C:
partition half its former size to make room for linux, and left drive
D: alone. Linux went on just fine, I used Debian 3.1r4 etch. (3.1r3
didn't recognize the hard disk or ethernet card.)

Then I used the recovery disks to put on a clean install of Windows.
The recovery went fine until the very end. When I put the system disk
back in, it says "copying files" and the progress bar goes to 40%, then
hangs. I tried rebooting, the windows image does not work.

The original drive configuration was

- active primary partition (hidden, approx. 5GB)
- extended partition
- logical partition (drive C
- primary partition (drive D

After installing linux, it looks like

- active primary partition (hidden, approx. 5GB)
- extended partition
- logical partition (drive C
- Linux root partition (/)
- Linux swap
- primary partition (drive D

system info

Aspire E360-UA381M
system disk for Aspire 3000/5000 series P/N: SD.A5103.002
3 recovery disks for Aspire 3000/5000 series P/N: RD.A5107.023

By the way I noticed the recovery disks say XP Pro, the system shipped
with XP multimedia.