I can access recovery mode (F9) but when it says "enter "yes" to restore....", I enter yes hit enter and nothing happens.
The enter key is working everywhere else. What's the trick? It's driving me nuts...

Not knowing if a restore partition is even present.
One cannot really say.
Sorry.

Especially when I owned a couple of EEEPCs. A 701 and 900. And they came with Xandros. Not Linpus Lite.
F9 was the restore key for Xandros.
Having ran the restore on mine when I had them. But they had a restore partition present.
No special tricks were required.

So something is real fishy here.

It's a first generation and I think the model # is 700. I believe it does have a recovery partition, but I'm not sure. Is there a way to check?

If Linpus is the only OS you have, you would need a Linux Live CD to get information. If you don't have a CD/DVD drive, you can put a Live CD on a flash drive. Not knowing if you have any other operating system, any other computer to work with or a Live Linux medium there's not much anyone can suggest. More information on what resources you have available.

Like Like yaneck said
Need a screenshot from like a

Salix Openbox 14.1 CD ISO (i486 & i686, 32-bit)

installed on usb or sd with

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Use the escape key on your keyboard to boot the live salix linux install.
Open gparted.
Take a screenshot of internal ssd partitions showing.

Upload here in this thread. Then we can tell you if you have a Linpus recovery partition or not.
All that might be needed is to do a file system check/repair on the recovery partition if it is present.
In case the recovery partition files are corrupted. From a improper power down while internal drive is mounted.
(It has happened to me.)
Gparted in Salix can handle that job if a recovery partition is present.

Will cross that bridge if you get that far.

What my eeepc used to look like. When I ran Puppeee on mine on external flash drive.

Anyways, good luck with it.

The EeePC 701 only had 4Gb of storage, what do you get when you run This may give an indication.

On my EeePC, I blew away the Xandros and reformatted the disk as 4Gb, removing the restore partition before installing Puppy Linux.

The nicer solution to determine if you've got a restore partition is as outlined by the guys above though.

Play Bonny!

This one has 2gb of storage - it was one of the early ones. And I've forgotten how to run things on this - how would I run that command?

You run the command from a terminal. If you've got Linpus Linux on it it would imply that the Xandros was wiped and Linpus installed. The 2Gb EeePC was notoriously tight on disk space so people used to use the whole disk rather than keep restore or swap partitions.

I don't know Linpus but would assume you have a menu with system tools or Administration or something? There should be a terminal app in there somewhere.

Play Bonny!

No way hoe zay you have a linpus restore partition.
2 gig internal ssd.
Not enough room.

I'd format as ext2 and buy a class 10 8 gig or bigger sd card and run a real linux distro on it.
Since Linpus is fubar (otherwise why restore?), unsupported, ancient, broken, yadda yadda yadda.

Lot's of good choices for a 800hz celeron , 512MB ram, eeepc on this forum

I think you're right and there's no recovery option built in. I tried running the command above in a terminal but again, the enter key does nothing. Tried sudo bash for kicks, nothing.
I do have a cd/dvd somewhere, but just wanted to reset everything and I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Thanks to all for responding!

I found the cd and made a bootable flash drive with the asus utility, but when I switched to boot from it, it couldn't find the eeepc os and wouldn't boot from it.

Use unetbootin instead.

I think I used unetbootin for a similar problem with an Acer Aspire. Why is it better? I gave the Asus to someone so I'll pass on the info to them.