Death and life of a netbook (Acer Aspire One)

I've got an acer aspire one
This isn't really a review but ever since i've got it, its been great. Small, light, perfect for travelling and storing photos on, its been round the world with us.

I really don't have a bad word to say about it, the Intel atom 1.6 GHz processor is great and the 1 gig of ram perfect for running xp home (yes sorry i had to get the Microsoft XP version, i did really want the linux one, but it wasn't just me using it and everyone else knows xp so xp it was), and the 160gig HD is perfect for storing the photos on.

small, fast, strong, light, good looking
all good praise
so why the post?

well it broke, i didn't do anything to it, didn't install anything nasty, didn't mess with its innards (i know better than to do that to a perfectly good working laptop) but it broke. i shut it down one day, proper full shut down (not hibernation or sleep) and that was it, next time i pressed the power button nothing happened, no splash screen, no BIOS info, just a black screen :-/ eek.

Well after searching the interweb it appears it happens now and again to this perfect specimen of a nettop laptop. luckily there were some instructions on how to fix it too :-) thank god for google...

I wont go into details here, see the link below, i just thought id better let other unfortunates know that sometimes a dead laptop isn't really dead. i was dreading sending it back to the manufactures though...

Detailed instructions here
http://www.qrpcw.com/2009/01/acer-aspire-one-bios-recovery.html

Download BIOS update from here
http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/as_one_150.html

happy days
now don't do that again. Speaking of which, if anyone knows why this happens could you let us know, im worried it might happen again, proper backups from now on then...

Triple boot install problems and reinstall of GRUB

My main dev machine at home is a triple boot, XP, Vista, Ubuntu machine currently with Ubuntu 8.10, and XP Pro installed. I recently added a new hard drive and had all sorts of problems with getting the boot sequences sorted out.

In a very breif nutshell this is what i did to fix it.

1st get vista booting again

To do this i used the vista boot disk and selected the repair your computer option followed by startup repair, i think i had to reboot and do it again as far as i recall but it did it in the end.

Finally reinstalled grub

First i used my ubuntu live cd and in a console ran

$ sudo grub

This puts you into a grub shell.

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

This will return a value which looks like (hd?, ?) this is where you will find /boot/grub. '?' will point to the specific partition of your disc which contains the boot grub for example (hd0,1)

grub> root (hd?,?)

Use the value from the find command eg (hd0,1)

Finally the command which will install GRUB into the MBR.

grub> setup (hd?)
grub> quit

Reboot and my Boot menu worked again :-) yay

Hopefully this will help someone.