Eee PC, heal thyself!

Tonight was an interesting exercise of the Eee PC’s abilities. For reasons unknown (I suspect some bum packages I installed while trying to get some cool effect working), my StarOffice (think Microsoft Office) was crashing intermittently. Instead of just leaving it alone, I had to try to fix it and in the process I totally screwed up the window manager on my Eee.

It always annoys me when things like this happen, however there is a certain confidence that comes with breaking your toy for the first time and having to put it back together.

So I launched into “figure out how to recover the Eee PC” mode. Interestingly, it only took me around 10 minutes. It seems that all Eee PCs come equipped with a restore partition that is accessible by pressing the F9 key during startup. This option lets you either restore the OS (which didn’t work so well for me) or do a full factory reset of the system. The latter took around 8 minutes to format the partitions, reinflate the image, and reboot.

My Eee PC was restored to its pristine, factory glory! Impressed doesn’t even begin to describe it! Score one for reading the manual!