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So I tried to boot my asus eee PC 900, but it said error: no such device:etcSo I did ls, and I tried ls for all partitions and some of the. Said bad Filename. Soo how can I perform a factory reset without a disc or a USB? It was just sitting in a closet before I opened it up, so I don't see much reason it is acting like that. There is no external damage that is visible. The os is Linux, don't know what version because It was given to me by a friend. Also if there is any way to recover Linux, I'm fine with that too.

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    More information is needed. Please include more information by revising your original question. You might include what you did before your system stopped booting, the operating systems installed, the operating system from factory, and computer model. If there is an physical damage then describe it. Decided what you want. Do you want to try to repair boot, or restore the factory operating system? Ask one question at a time. If you can't boot the system from any of it's internal disks and get it to work from an existing partition you will need external media to recover from the problem.
    – John Hall
    Jun 3, 2016 at 21:45
  • John hall, how would I use the external media? I. Kinda new to this
    – Jclegoking
    Jun 3, 2016 at 22:10
  • Make a bootable USB KEY on another computer then boot from that. ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick
    – John Hall
    Jun 3, 2016 at 22:19

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In grub you can get a list of devices by typing "ls" with no argument at the grub prompt. A common mistake is to leave out the brackets. You can get a list of partitions by listing just the device from the list but you still must include the parentheses (round brackets). In grub drives and partitions are named in brackets and use a different naming convention. During boot disks are mapped to device files in dev. In grub that has yet to happen. List partitions on the first disk: ls (HD0) The first disk and first partition usually is ls (HD0,1) ls (HD0,MSDOS1) or ls (HD0,GPT1)

And for a usb key ls (USB0)

The disk numbering starts at 0 but the partition numbering starts at 1. This will be the first partition in the partition table which does not always map to disk geometry. With traditional msdos partition tables you also will have a primary partition that contains additional logical partitions. For these you will have another parameter in the parentheses. This will be evident when you LS the primary partition.
If you get a grub prompt but the computer is not booting to linux there is a good chance that when upgrading the computer someone reinstalled another version of linux and put the bootloader in a partition rather than the MBR but left the old grub in the MBR. You are running that old grub which points to an installation that was deleted. You could read how to chainload grub if this is the case or get the boot parameters from the grub configuration file and boot manual from this grub. However since there is not data you want to recover its best to reinstall. The best way is to create a USB key. You must mark it bootable and the bios must be set to boot from USB key, but if you have problems with getting your computer to boot from a USB key but you can see it with "ls" then you probably can chainload the bootloader on the key with grub, or even from an iso image file in a fliesystem on a usb drive, without the key prepared for automatic boot. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot (quoted from that page)

o mount an ISO via the GRUB terminal, determine the location/path of the ISO file, then:

loopback loop (hdX,Y)//

Example: loopback loop (hd0,5)/my_isos/ubuntu-12.04-desktop-amd64.iso

Once mounted via the above command, the ISO can be inspected using the ls command. The ISO will be mounted on "(loop)".

ls (loop)/

ls (loop)/casper

On an Ubuntu ISO, this should display vmlinuz and initrd.img, among other files. < need steps to booting from iso, directly or by chain loading.) >

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