Turn on Eee PC
Press F2 to get into the BIOS
Under the Advanced header, change
OS Installation from Finished to Start
Under the Boot header, choose Hard Disk Drives, and make your USB device the 1st Drive
Under the Boot header, choose Boot Device Priority, and make it so your USB external drive boots before the HDD
Save and reboot
connect and power your usb dvd-rom (if it is externally powered)
Turn on Eee PC
In the bios screen press ESC (instead of F2)
choose your usb device from the list
proceed with the next section
Place the DVD that came with your Eee PC (if restoring to factory Xandros) or the DVD burned from the XEPC .iso image (if installing the XEPC customised Xandros) in the DVD drive
Boot the Eee PC
Choose the right device to boot from
Factory DVD only: Press TAB when it asks if you would like to fix your Eee PC – do not get confused if this sounds a little odd, the image gets restored next
Factory DVD only: Choose “Asus Eee PC” and type yes
XEPC DVD only: Follow the instructions on the screen
Let it reinstall the
OS image
Reboot
Go back into the BIOS and change the
OS Installation from Start to Finished. Save and Exit.
You have a fully fresh Eee PC, even with the original first time user screens.
If you do not change the OS Installation from Start to Finished in the BIOS, you may have troubles with the webcam displaying only a black screen.
See also Howto: USB Restore to create a bootable USB memory device from the DVD.
If you have a corrupted DVD image or a bad burn of the DVD (if you've burned your own DVD from the XEPC image) then the attempt to copy the system image file to the EEE PC may fail, producing dd errors like “buffer I/O error on device sr0”. If this occurs you'll need to create a new install DVD and restart the install process. Your EEE PC will not be able to boot until you install a clean OS image, although the BIOS setup and boot menus will still be accessible.
Remember that restoring from the DVD re-creates all the partitions that come on a factory install on the Eee PC. Period. If you have made any changes to the machine, they will be erased. Remember, this is great if you mess up your system because you can always undo your changes, but you should always have your data backed up on another medium if you restore your Eee.
