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!

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

Most computers these days come with a hidden partition from which to restore the factory software configuration. I don't know how Ubuntu handles that partition - maybe it left it alone, maybe it overwrote the partition. If the latter, you may be out of luck.

Answer 5

As it is said here, you need to press Alt+F10 buttons while bios is loading. But, you could delete recovery partition using XUbuntu installer (Use entire disk option). This way you need to search through Internet your recovery partition image and put it on USB drive, or take an external CD/DVD drive and put there CD/DVD that came with your netbook. Also look at this topic at superuser.com