My recently aquired (used) asus eee pc 701 came with XP installed and no support CD/DVD. I wanted to get rid of XP and have a play with the stock linux O/S instead: I expected this to be an easy gimmie, but it was not, and ate up an evenings worth of my time googling around for solutions so I’m going to lay out the shortcuts here to hopefully save someone else the pain.
As mentioned, the eeepc I acquired had XP installed (nlited) and no recovery DVD, so no option of using the built in rescue partition to restore the EEEPC back to the factory state. (Apparently you can hit F9 normally and it takes to to a ‘restore me from hidden partiton’ type GRUB menu). I figured this wouldn’t be a problem, I’d just go to the Asus support site and grab the image. Its linux, right, should be able to get the firmware images easily from the manufacturer, right?
Wrong.
I ransacked the official eeepc.asus.com support site looking for what I needed: at the other end of the search I can honestly say I found zero useful material or info there. (Don’t even bother visiting it, you’re better off going straight to google for this). The support/download section had BIOS updates and the like, but nothing to help with a reinstall. Even searching the forums for what I imagined to be blatantly obvious issues (eg: where do I download the restore cd?) came up with bupkis.
I concluded, to my chagrin, Asus has decided to withhold the support software (a linux distro?) for whatever reason, and the forums were evidently being policed according to this policy, removing any useful information pertaining to it. I expected to find at least a link to an outside site, as google was telling me about various helpful torrents: not finding even a whisper of this on the official support forums smells like seafood.
After a bit of googling and torrent searching I found a few ISO images which purported to be eeepc 701 flavored including a copy of Ubuntu, but I couldn’t get them to run from USB key: syslinux made the drive bootable but either the kernel options were wrong and linux would not boot, or I could get it to boot by plugging in manual options (specifying location of initrd etc) but only made it partway into a boot before falling over and restarting. (I didn’t bother noting or chasing down those errors as I didn’t particularly fancy my mission this evening to be going down the road of fixing boot issues in roll-your-own livecds booting from USB sticks). I realise I’ll probably have to suss this out properly for installing Ubuntu and other flavors down the road, but for now I just wanted the stock Xandros system restore.
I eventually found some downloads which solved the problem.
Heres the process in WinXP:
- The first thing you need is the EeePC 901 ASUS Linux USB Flash Utility available from eeefiles.com (Link updated! http://www.netbookfiles.com/574/eee-pc-8g-xp-asus-usb-flash-utility-version-v1131/ ). I guess this is the version which comes on the support DVD, but I don’t have that and it wasn’t available from the official site, so… (By the way, thanks a lot Asus, making me resort to downloading from a third party site instead of a trusted source).
- The next file you’ll need is the Xandros Eee Pc 701 Edition ISO. Get it from the eeepc 701 community project on sourceforge.
- Once you’ve downloaded both of the above its all pretty much downhill!
- Now either burn the ISO to a physical disk, or mount the image using a program like daemontools.
- Plug in your 2GB+ USB stick
- Run the USB Flash utility, select the detected USB drive,wait for it to format. If prompted, remove and re-insert the stick after the format. It will ask for the linux disk (either insert the physical copy you burned or mount the ISO into a drive).
- Linux will copy (it takes a few minutes) and at the end you should have a bootable restore on the USB drive.
- Power on the eeepc, hit F2 for BIOS options, go to “Advanced” and set the “OS Installation” to “Start”. F10 to Save and exit.
- Put the USB drive in your eeepc, reboot, hit escape on POST to get to the boot menu, and you’re off.
- Xandros will install (took about ten minutes on mine). Remember to go back into the BIOS and set “OS Installation” to “Finished” once its finished.
That really shouldn’t have taken me a whole evening of googling to get done =
Danny
Posted on 28th November, 2008
Thanks! I lost my restore dvd and I had been googleing a solution to restore back to the Xandros install and this saved most of my evening.
Glen Scott
Posted on 28th November, 2008
No worries, glad it helped! Ubuntu netbook remix (http://www.ubuntu-eee.com/ ) is even better and dead easy to install =)
Jon
Posted on 11th December, 2008
Is there any way to restore in the absence of a Windows machine? All mine are Linux only. The flash utility is for MS Windows.
Thanks even if the answer is not encouraging. (The restore DVD should be made freely available, as it would do no good to anybody without an EeePC anyway. It’s astonishing that they take this course.)
Glen Scott
Posted on 11th December, 2008
Hey Jon
Yeah its possible using something like syslinux:
http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/The_Syslinux_Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syslinux
I have not done it myself (with this distro) but I imagine you probably have to do *something* like the following in linux:
1) Format your USB drive to FAT32
2) Mount the .ISO file somewhere (using loopback?)
3) Copy all/part of the contents of the mounted ISO to your USB drive
4) Set the USB drive bootable using fdisk
5) Install and configure syslinux on the USB drive – this will likely involve customising the kernel parameters etc
There are probably tutorials for this out there but they probably cover specific distros rather than the eeepc restore. I’d trawl google and see what comes up:
http://www.google.com/search?q=convert+livecd+usb+linux
I may look into this a bit more and post more about if I get time…
-Glen
Nick
Posted on 5th April, 2009
Hi Glenn
I’m in the process of putting my Eee PC onto eBay and wanted to revert it to Linux from WinXP. I suspect your clear, detailed instrctions saved me a lost weekend! Much appreciated.
Cheers
Nick
Fil
Posted on 15th April, 2009
Thanks for posting this, super useful!!
Glen Scott
Posted on 20th April, 2009
Hi Nick, no problem, glad it saved you some time.
Glen Scott
Posted on 20th April, 2009
No worries, glad it helped!
Lee
Posted on 1st May, 2009
I’m having a problem with this, I followed all the steps, & everything goes fine until I boot the eeePc, it says “uncompressing Linux…OK, booting the kernel.
Wait 15 sec. for USB subsytem…
Trying disk sdb…
Trying disk sdc…
Found EEEPC image on USB flash memory [/dev/sdc]..
Could not find a valid EeePC installation image on the USB/SD device.
please create the EEEPC USB or SD-card image & retry.
Press enter to reboot…
Any ideas?
Thanks
Lee
Posted on 1st May, 2009
Ok, I got it.
I had to re-burn the ISO, must have been something wrong with the first one.
[...] Disk (download torrent) – TPB Allí encontré un torrent con el restore disk, está activo. —- glenscott.net Restore an Eee PC 701 back to factory Xandros from a USB stick with no ASUS Support DV… Y encontré una guia con links de descarga para dejar el asus eee 701 como de fábrica desde XP. Eso [...]
Richard
Posted on 13th May, 2009
Just a quick note to say thank you, followed the instructions to the letter and worked like a dream. Cheers 
Simon
Posted on 13th May, 2009
Glen …. Thats the man who saved my life, my Eee was ALL dead. Thanks a lot.
Glen Scott
Posted on 13th May, 2009
No worries, this stuff really should be documented and downloads available on the asus site…
phil
Posted on 20th May, 2009
Thank you so much. worked waaaay better than the unetbootin tool which didn’t work at all!
Shyam
Posted on 3rd June, 2009
Thank you very much for the detailed tutorial. I will be completing this restore this evening and greatly appreciate you taking time to put this together!
OP13
Posted on 16th June, 2009
Thanks for this guide! I’ve been curious about using Xandros for the past year (my 701 came pre-installed with XP from Asus) and I’ve wanted to try it out. Now I can! Thank you so much- you’ve definitely saved me an evening of google-ing.
SlovenianGuy
Posted on 30th June, 2009
Thank you so much!
When i bought the EEE PC 701, i got bored too quickly off the installed linux and installed Windows XP SP2. After 4 months i got bored, and decided to get the preinstalled linux back to work. I tried different things, but no sucess. Thanks to you, i got it back to work.
Room
Posted on 28th July, 2009
Thank you very much for this “howto”. Very usefull, fast and safe.
nick
Posted on 31st July, 2009
Everything runs okay until I get to this error:
Home partition (sdb1) exists already. Formatting this partition may reslt in data loss. Enter ‘yes’ if you would like to format this partition.
Format parition? [yes/NO]: yes
Formatting home partition…
mke2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
cp: cannot create directory ‘mnt/mnt/user’: Input/output error
Ready… Press ENTER to reboot
Does anyone know how to correct this? I installed Ubuntu and have to switch it back to Xandros so I can ship it back to the factory otherwise it’s not covered under warranty. When I reboot, it goes to the “Starting system” screen with the ASUS logo (as if in Xandros) but then flashes a cursor and the black screen shifts back and forth from dark black to just black. I’m at a loss! Please help.
Nick
Glen Scott
Posted on 31st July, 2009
Nick, I would try a complete wipe of the onboard disk first and try the Xandros install again.
Probably the best way to do this is by booting in with another livecd/liveusb and using fdisk to remove all the partitions, or you could use something like DBAN (http://www.dban.org/) – can use USB version or the livecd should work with Unetbootin for USB boot (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/).
steve
Posted on 3rd August, 2009
i always get the message
Linux…OK, booting the kernel.
Wait 15 sec. for USB subsytem…
Trying disk sdb…
Trying disk sdc…
Found EEEPC image on USB flash memory [/dev/sdc]..
Could not find a valid EeePC installation image on the USB/SD device.
please create the EEEPC USB or SD-card image & retry.
Press enter to reboot…
please help, i’ve done this at least 10 times and still i get this message
rankin
Posted on 18th September, 2009
Thank you so much for your guide .I tried eeeubuntu but found the wifi signal was poor with that o/s.Found the recovery disc had crack on it,so was glad to find your guide.Followed instructions to the letter and worked fine.Found that I had to download image twice,that was only problem.
Chris
Posted on 19th October, 2009
This was exactly what a I was looking for today! Thanks a lot!
Steve-
I was having the same issue. Are you sure you properly mounted the .iso image into your virtual drive?
Chris
For those of you having trouble to access Eeefiles.com
We changed our address to Netbookfiles.com
To download the Flash utility goto : http://www.netbookfiles.com/ASUS
Sorry about the inconvinience caused!!
Hispis
Posted on 9th January, 2010
I really thank you ..
it saved me hours of time !
not that i want to give other faqs a bad name the are just not cleary enough !
thx
Ray
Posted on 26th January, 2010
I’m getting this error too where it can’t find a valid image on the USB drive. I did notice that in your instructions you say the copying will take a few minutes, but mine only took a few seconds. I’m thinking something is wrong with the copying, but I don’t know what. I’ve tried two .iso file now. I am mounting them using magicdisc and they are mounted properly as I can browse them and when it is not mounted the copy program asks for the disc. After mounting it the copy program continues.
Linux…OK, booting the kernel.
Wait 15 sec. for USB subsytem…
Trying disk sdb…
Trying disk sdc…
Found EEEPC image on USB flash memory [/dev/sdc]..
Could not find a valid EeePC installation image on the USB/SD device.
please create the EEEPC USB or SD-card image & retry.
Press enter to reboot…
NeedsHelp!
Posted on 24th March, 2010
I have an Eee PC 701. A while ago it just crached. Now I have to reboot in last known working config.
When I do so, I don’t have a start menu, to get anything to come up at all I have to ctrl+alt+delete in order to bring up my windows XP task manager. From there I have to run task etc. in order to get anything to run (Firefox, notepad, etc.)
Any Ideas on how I can get this thing to a stable OS? (LINUX!!!)
Any help would be awesome!
John Celli
Posted on 31st March, 2010
Format goes fine but it copies too quickly and in fact nothing copies. F appears in drive window of flash utility. This is USB for me. Should that be D (my CD with burned ISO)? If so there does not appear to be any way to switch to D.
Any thoughts you might have would be very much appreciated.
Thanks,
John
Glen Scott
Posted on 13th April, 2010
Sounds like your Windows install is corrupt – I would suggest you follow the procedure in the above article to install Xandros, or this other article to install Ubuntu.
Glen Scott
Posted on 13th April, 2010
Sounds like you are having trouble at the initial stage of creating the boot disk? As per screenshots at the unetbootin page, make sure the “Type” is set to USB Drive and the correct drive letter (d:) for your usb device. “Disk Image” should be ISO and point at the downloaded ISO file.
If the settings are correct and there is still the same issue, I’d suggest trying another USB device, verify the checksum on your downloaded ISO to make sure it is valid (if not re-download), and try again.
Matt Spalding
Posted on 4th May, 2010
Thank you so much for this guide! I had similar problems to you (not being able to find any official info) and your guide made it so easy.
You’re my hero!
paulr
Posted on 29th July, 2010
To those asking for a usb flash tool for linux,
most repos have Unetbootin, you can use this to create a bootable flash usb stick.
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