I don’t have an external USB CD-ROM drive, nor a live Xandros installation to build an usb recovery image.

The prerequisites are:

  • the file named system_image.gz that is on the Recovery CD.
  • a live linux system (knoppix? SysRescueCD? I’ve used my debian on nfs.)
  • basic knowledge of a partition tool editor (like cfdisk).

system_image.gz is the compressed image of the root system. Copy it on a usb pen, samba share, public_html, where you want! Start the eee-box with the live system of your choice, and unpack the compressed root on the internal drive of EEE-Box with:

zcat system_image.gz > /dev/sdb (nb: my debian recognized the harddisk as sdb, on other live system can be sda, check the dmesg for being sure)

Now we need to add a second ext3 partition that will be used as /home directory with cfdisk: remember to create it as Primary Partition, so it will be called sdb2. After, create a swap partition in a Extended Partition, so it will be named sdb5.

Format the newly crated partition with: mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb2 mkswap /dev/sdb5

Reboot, and you are ready to use a brand new Asus Xandros.