Restore XP on Acer Aspire One netbook

Question

I have an Acer Aspire One D250 netbook which came with Windows XP (but no CD) on which I have since installed Xubuntu 9.10. Now I am trying to sell it, but I cannot find a way to recover XP.

I have read in a lot of different places that holding Alt+F10 during boot should send me to a recovery menu (which will allow me to restore XP from a "secret partition"), but I have tried many times to no avail.

The best I can do is get the BIOS setup screen by holding F2, but there doesn't seem to be any recovery option there.

After the initial option to go into the BIOS setup GRUB starts loading and there don't seem to be any more opportunities to enter a system setup screen. Please help!

Solution 1

My recovery button is F4, so you could try holding that when your BIOS screen comes up.

Solution 2

Check out this article. I've been able to get the Alt-F10 shortcut working. Now, the Acer is recovering.

Solution 3

You can buy recovery disks from Acer Support. You probably wiped out the XP recovery partition when you installed Ubuntu

Comments

[Imran]

OK, so this partition would be visible to the Ubuntu installer? If this is the case I may have wiped it during installation assuming that I could do no harm.

[igorlord]

That is my guess as to what happened.