A friend of mine who has Asus 1005HA deleted his recovery partition to free up disk-space. He didn’t knew what the consequences could be. He felt the need of recovery just few days after it and he realised that he couldn’t use the recovery mode anymore. He gave me his netbook. It took me a while to figure out how to restore the partition.
What you require:
Another computer with DVD drive
USB flash drive (minimum 1GB) and another USB flash/hard drive(minimum 4.5GB)
PEtoUSB
ISO extraction software (winrar/7zip)
Any linux distro
Once you are setup with the requirements, follow these steps to restore:
-
- Extract WINPE.iso to any folder on harddrive on second computer. Suppose this folder is D:\WINPE
- Edit D:\WINPE\I386\SYSTEM32\WINPESHL.INI:
Change:
AppPath=x:\EPCRecover.exe
To:
AppPath=x:\GHOST32.EXE
-
- Insert pendrive in the computer, and use PEtoUSB to make pendrive bootable. In Vista and Win7 please use admin mode.
Check ‘USB Removable’, and select the pen-drive.
Check ‘Enable Disk Format’.
Source Path To Built BartPE/WinPE Files: D:\WINPE
Check ‘Enable File Copy’ and select ‘Overwrite Always
-
- Copy \Recovery\envir.GHO and \RECOVERY\envir.cmd from DVD to the root of your pen drive.
- Convert your Pen-drive filesystem from FAT32 to NTFS by executing the following command in command-line:
convert x: /fs:ntfs
//change x to your pen-drive letter.
-
- Disable the boot-booster on your 1005HA by pressing F2 two times as soon as you switch it on and disable it in BIOS.
- Insert the pen-drive on 1005HA and press Esc repeatedly on bootup and select the flash drive to boot from. You’ll get into WINPE environment and Norton Ghost will start. Select to disk, from image and select envir.gho. This will repartition your complete hard-drive as it was when you purchased. Please note that this will destroy any data on your hard-drive. Make sure you back-up your data before doing this.
- Download a linux distribution which recognises NTFS partitions. Use unetbootin to make the distribution USB bootable. Boot into live mode. I recommend Uubntu NBR for the purpose. Mount the partition labeled ‘PE’, this is your recovery partition.
- On second computer copy \Recovery from the DVD to a larger pen-drive/hard-drive. Connect this drive to 1005HA and copy all the contents in \Recovery from your pen-drive to root of PE.
- You can also edit the WINPESHL.INI to look like this:
AppPath = x:\minint\system32\recover.exe
This is it. Restart your computer.
Cheers!!