MikeZ has kindly looked into creating images of the partitions that the mininote comes installed with. This give the option of easily restoring the notebook back to factory settings;

If you absolutely, positively, must restore your machine now - before I can devise a bootable stick . . . First, you will need to boot into a memory resident *nix OS - - any “LiveCD” with access to command line should do just fine. If you have to build your own, here is what I know so far:

• USB sticks - BIOS identifies those to grub as fd0 - looks like it is expecting a
• USB-FDD (super-floppy) layout.
• SDHC cards - BIOS identifies those to grub as hd0,x - looks like any USB-HDD layout will work.
• External disk drives - most likely anything will work.

Now that you have booted into a memory resident *nix (somehow - student exercise at the moment) . . . You will need these two files: Contact me through the “send e-mail” button in my profile here - - -

• Local site forums
• Netbookuser Forums

I need to limit the distribution until I have a chance to check the archive for non-distributable files. Using the contact features of this forum will help limit the distribution to “owners only”. Please ensure that you are root when you do the following;

• Restore the content of the first cylinder (includes mbr and partition table):

    gunzip cyl0.bin.gz
    dd if=cyl0.bin of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=16065

• Format the new first (only) partition (sda1) as ext3 (ordered data mode)

• Restore the factory files to the just formated partition:

    mkdir /media/sda1
    mount /dev/sda1 /media/sda1
    tar xzf sda1.tgz /media/sda1

You should also be able to do the above to any 4G or larger SDHC card and just boot the result. If you do the above to any 4G or larger USB stick - you will probably have to diddle things to get it to boot. Any “HowTo Diddle It” posts are welcome - just tack them on down here.

You should also be able to un-archive the sda1.tgz onto your file system somewhere and run it under Linux-VServer with a bit of diddling the start-up process (a chore familiar to users of Linux-VServer).

If you need support for this process - reread this post - this is it (at least for now).