Gregor Müllegger's Weblog

Howto reset your ASUS EEE 1101HA

I recently bought a cute little ASUS EEE 1101HA. The first thing I've done after receiving it was installing the latest Ubuntu version. So I hoped the best. But after trying some things and searching the Internet it seems that the Linux support for this netbook really sucks.

Display isn't working very well, multitouch touchpad doesn't work, microphone doesn't work properly and so on. I expected to have some small issues which I need to solve, but this was too much.

I decided to sell it again - but usually customers aren't that happy if you promise them a WinXP netbook but they receive one with a broken ubuntu ;-)

So I needed to do reinstall windows xp from the recovery DVD. This isn't as easy as it sounds, since the netbook has no optical drive.

I first expected to use my USB stick for the recovery as I used it to install Ubuntu. After following and testing some instructions from different EEE sites, I saw that this don't work for me.

For the rescue I found an old IDE DVD drive at home which I attached by an USB to IDE adapter to the netbook. This didn't worked either: the recovery DVD exited on boot with the message "NTLDR is corrupt. Cannot boot."! Isn't it nice of ASUS to provide such a good recovery experience (and no, ASUS don't provide instructions howto reinstall the netbook)?

After a lot of flaming, here is the way how it worked for me:

Insert the recovery DVD into another computer.
Copy the WINPE.ISO from the DVD to your harddisk.
Openup the WINPE.ISO file (I used MagicISO - a Windows program to modify ISO images) and change the AppPath value in I368\SYSTEM32\WINPESHL.INI to X:\GHOST32.exe. This is how the file looks for me now:
```
[LaunchApp]
AppPath = X:GHOST32.exe
[LaunchApps]
X:devcon.exe, disable usbstordisk
```
Burn the ISO.
Put the Recovery\EEEPC-GER.gho file from the recovery DVD on a USB memory stick that is large enough to handle it (the exact filename may vary, since it depends on your language).
Find a way to boot the burned ISO on your 1101HA (I used an old IDE CD drive with a USB to IDE adapter)
The Ghost tool pops up automatically. Select "Local > Disk > From image" in the menu.
Choose the *.gho file which you put on your USB stick earlier.
Reboot your EEE PC and see if everything is fine.