I recently had to send my EEE PC (904ha/xp) back to Asus to resolve an issue. Unlike other laptops I have had in the past there seem an issue with this machine in that the battery was never 100% charged. I read online about the issue and they all referred to contacting Asus for a swap out.
Although the laptop was on charge for over 48 hours constant, or it is was being used on the mains the led light for the power was always red/orange. On reading the manual it said that this colour indicated the battery was between 80-100% capacity. A solid green indicated 100% capacity.
After several emails to Asus it was agreed to send the unit back for repair. I prepped the machine for delivery by backing it up with Ghost as I didn't want to waste three days rebuilding it again. Wiped the hard drive clean and sent it back. Two days later it was returned...
The note inside from the engineer said LED lights displaying correctly, no OS on Hard drive so reinstalled OS.
This is where my confusion started...... I called Asus on a non 0870 number obtained through www.saynoto0870.com and got through to the wrong department. After conversation with an engineer he advised that the manual for the laptop had been rewritten and that the operation of the LED was correct. So the hassle of returning it was a wasted exercise.
This is when the fun started with the restore.....
Because I had 4 partitions - 1. Windows XP, 2. Ubunutu Boot, 3. EXT3 of Home and 4. of restore disk for windows xp.
Although ghost had backed up everything the restore would not be straight forward as I needed to boot into ghost to restore partitions 2,3,4 then restore 1. However I needed to have partition 1. up and running to get partition 1. restored. Because there was no cd drive I couldn't boot a windows set up cd so "I was up a stream without a paddle"
On looking for a way to create a bootable windows partition on USB I came across a concept online of using a host linux OS with a VMWARE Windows session with direct access to the local hard drive. It would work with me booting into linux, running a vmware product which was a windows installation that would then have raw access to the local c drive in the machine. Because the vmware would use ISO files of the CD installations this would get around the issue of no cd drive.
I opted for easy peasy linux 1, on an 8gb memory card with Sun Virtual Box installed. I had to create a virtual hard disk raw file pointing to the local hard drive in the netbook. Albeit slow, I was able to restore the original parition 1 using a symantec livestate demo cd iso. Reinstall the original bootsector and MBR with a windows recovery session (again in virtualbox) to both remove GRUB and allow the original windows to boot.
Before booting back into the windows I recreated both ext3 linux partition (2 & 3) as blank areas. Booted into partition 1, restored partition 2,3 & 4 using the ghost. I then rebooted back into linux and ran the livestate cd to reinstall partition 1 again to ensure GRUB was installed.
Overall it took over one day and has been a success. Further I now also have a bootable memory card which can be used as a bootable USB stick. This will also allow to run a windows environment under VM (as long as the host PC is powerful enough) to run either Windows or Linux utilities.
Although the laptop was on charge for over 48 hours constant, or it is was being used on the mains the led light for the power was always red/orange. On reading the manual it said that this colour indicated the battery was between 80-100% capacity. A solid green indicated 100% capacity.
After several emails to Asus it was agreed to send the unit back for repair. I prepped the machine for delivery by backing it up with Ghost as I didn't want to waste three days rebuilding it again. Wiped the hard drive clean and sent it back. Two days later it was returned...
The note inside from the engineer said LED lights displaying correctly, no OS on Hard drive so reinstalled OS.
This is where my confusion started...... I called Asus on a non 0870 number obtained through www.saynoto0870.com and got through to the wrong department. After conversation with an engineer he advised that the manual for the laptop had been rewritten and that the operation of the LED was correct. So the hassle of returning it was a wasted exercise.
This is when the fun started with the restore.....
Because I had 4 partitions - 1. Windows XP, 2. Ubunutu Boot, 3. EXT3 of Home and 4. of restore disk for windows xp.
Although ghost had backed up everything the restore would not be straight forward as I needed to boot into ghost to restore partitions 2,3,4 then restore 1. However I needed to have partition 1. up and running to get partition 1. restored. Because there was no cd drive I couldn't boot a windows set up cd so "I was up a stream without a paddle"
On looking for a way to create a bootable windows partition on USB I came across a concept online of using a host linux OS with a VMWARE Windows session with direct access to the local hard drive. It would work with me booting into linux, running a vmware product which was a windows installation that would then have raw access to the local c drive in the machine. Because the vmware would use ISO files of the CD installations this would get around the issue of no cd drive.
I opted for easy peasy linux 1, on an 8gb memory card with Sun Virtual Box installed. I had to create a virtual hard disk raw file pointing to the local hard drive in the netbook. Albeit slow, I was able to restore the original parition 1 using a symantec livestate demo cd iso. Reinstall the original bootsector and MBR with a windows recovery session (again in virtualbox) to both remove GRUB and allow the original windows to boot.
Before booting back into the windows I recreated both ext3 linux partition (2 & 3) as blank areas. Booted into partition 1, restored partition 2,3 & 4 using the ghost. I then rebooted back into linux and ran the livestate cd to reinstall partition 1 again to ensure GRUB was installed.
Overall it took over one day and has been a success. Further I now also have a bootable memory card which can be used as a bootable USB stick. This will also allow to run a windows environment under VM (as long as the host PC is powerful enough) to run either Windows or Linux utilities.
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