Yet Another James Green Web Developer, Aquarist

ASUS AI Recovery Exception Error Solved

This past August I gave my fiance an ASUS laptop for her birthday. Only this past weekend, however, did we grab some blank DVDs to use as backups for the AU Recovery tool they ship. You know the one - it pops up each time you boot asking if you want to burn the backups to disc yet.

So we fired it up, and it told us five discs would be needed. It burned the first two fine but the third failed. Unfortunately the message said only that an "exception" had occurred, without detailing possible causes.

At which point she handed the machine over to me. Oh good..!

Nothing wrong with the machine, I thought. Mind you, looking at C: drive she only had 800MB of 60GB space left. How on earth had she filled it? She normally doesn't go beyond Hotmail and Facebook, and she has AVG installed so hopefully it's not a virus.

I fired up the Add/Remove Programs utility and found Microsoft Office Trial which I duely deleted, freeing up an insanely large amount of capacity (gigabytes). I wonder if it's running out of disk space?

Google time, lots of people reporting much the same problems, and suggesting that people merely capture the .iso files the utility produces and write them to DVD using a separate utility. Surely not..? Anyway, I found the location and discovered Disc 3 was in fact zero bytes, yet Disc 4 had around 1GB. There was no Disc 5. There were also folders, presumable for building the .iso images from. That's a lot of disk space to be used for building, indeed 5x4.6GB plus temporary storage!

There being no other option, I quit the backup tool and was about to re-run the application once again when I saw the free space on C: drive leap up to 36GB. The backup tool had erased the images and temporary data. I re-ran the tool and watched the C: drive fill slowly, occassionally asking for new DVD. This time, Disc 3 had 4.6GB of data, as did Disc 4, and Disc 5 was now present with 1GB of data.

The DVDs finished. Moral of this story is that ASUS partitions your C: drive with too little spare room for all the added "essentials" like Office Trial plus any Windows Updates (love those Gigs...) over time to be able to use the backup tool. Unfortunately it's not always easy to shift the data from C: to D: where over 100GB of free space was in our case to be found. She didn't have much in My Documents, except the backup tool's own temporary data.

Hopefully this will educate and prevent further trouble for others with ASUS notebooks. And ASUS, how about providing better error information?