I have had the Acer Aspire One for over a year and it has worked fine, until one day my partner borrowed it and took it to his parents house, and everything on it has stopped working! He tells me he did nothing out of the ordinary to it, but all of a sudden I couldn't access the Internet - it doesn't even scan for Wi-fi connections at all.

I also can no longer see any files in the my disk folder although I know they are still there as I can still click on photo master and it shows the files and folders which appear to have disappeared. I cannot however copy them from there so therefore I can't format the whole thing as I have not backed all of my files up!

Please can someone help me it is driving me mad!

I have also just learned that I can't access the webcam or any of the sd slots!

If this is Ubuntu or probably even if it is not, you can Boot up with the live cd and access or back up the files with the live session...

In the Ubuntu Live CD you can do this by clicking Accessories;Terminal. And then opening a browser with administrator privileges by typing the following command:

gksudo nautilus

A password box will open. After entering your password an administrator file browser will open. In case any of your files have somehow become hidden files you can then choose to view the hidden files within the browser by clicking "View" from the file menu and selecting "Show Hidden files". From this browser you can then move the files off your hard drive and onto another storage device.

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Thanks, the only problem is that it doesn't have a CD drive, and therefore didn't come with a CD!

Any other suggestions?

Use another computer to make a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu.
Download the Ubuntu ISO, Unetbootin and have a spare 1GB USB drive, and you're all set