Recently I’ve purchased a netbook that should help me to become more mobile and to develop this site more quickly. It’s ASUS EEE 901, and it was chosen for good time on battery, low weight and all the communications available (including bluetooth). After several experiments, that were performed to increase free space on my C partition, I have deleted some folders that were essential for Windows, so I decided to restore Windows to its initial state.

The first thing I need to tell is that I don’t have an external DVD-ROM and I don’t plan to buy one. So there really was no place to insert DVD to. First thing I’ve tried was to create an ISO image of the DVD and burn it to my USB flash. That was done, but the disk refused to boot telling me I should have a DVD inserted. Then I have investigated the DVD and found two big gho files. Ok, the recovery CD uses Norton Ghost to restore image files.That’s nice.

Further investigation on the Recovery CD leaded to the discovery of winpe.iso file that contained GHOST32.exe. That was even better: it could be possible to restore images with it. The next thing I has to do was to create a bootable Flash drive and to run ghost32.exe.

So in order to restore the images you need to create a bootable flash disk. There is a list of methods that are available here . I think that the most simple is to search for “HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool” in Google. This is Freeware and it will allow you to create a bootable flash drive. The you need to copy image files (they are located under Recovery folder of the DVD and GHOST32.exe to the bootable flash. Then you will need to boot from this flash and to gun ghost32, then restore the images and you’re done!

Here is an alternative method of doing the same: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/windows:restorexp_from_usb. Hope this helps you to revent your Windows to its initial state.

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