Sometimes a user manages to mess up their system, and it needs to be reset to how it was when they first got it. This is done with what is referred to as the “F9” restore. How you do this is actually fairly simple. When you see the BIOS splash screen press and hold the F9 key. After a few seconds you see the following menu.
You select “Restore Factory Settings” and press enter. It will format the user partition thus restoring your system to its original state.
Some things to note: F9 restore is in fact not part of the bios, but rather part of the boot loader(grub) So the F9 key is actually only read for about 1 second AFTER the bios splash screen.
The menu you see is stored on the SYSTEM partition at ”/boot/grub/menu.lst” and can be modified to do many things. It should be noted however you must have write access to the system partition to edit the file. Otherwise it will simply end up in the user partition, and not be read.
The original “menu.lst”
# # Configured by Xandros Configuration system. # hiddenmenu # default boot entry default=0 # Boot automatically after 1 second. timeout=0 # Fallback to Configure. fallback=2 title Normal Boot root (0x80,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21.4-eeepc quiet rw vga=785 irqpoll root=/dev/sda1 initrd /boot/initramfs-eeepc.img title Perform Disk Scan root (0x80,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21.4-eeepc quiet rw vga=785 irqpoll root=/dev/sda1 XANDROSSCAN=y initrd /boot/initramfs-eeepc.img title Restore Factory Settings root (0x80,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21.4-eeepc quiet rw vga=normal nosplash=y irqpoll root=/dev/sda1 XANDROSRESTORE=y initrd /boot/initramfs-eeepc.img
