Suppose you've checked in BIOS for enabling of boot from USB but it
would be counter-productive of Acer to not allow this. From a fault
finding point of view being able to boot from a USB device is very
useful. Have you tried an external USB DVD drive and Live CD ?

Hooked up the USB DVD, a flash drive. Went to the bios as best I could
according to I think it is F2. The option on the screen said something
about F8 or F5 for boot options but went to the windows7 boot option no
other options presented. I checked the Live CD and flash drive on two
other machines without any problem booting from them.

In all honesty I had my friend return the computer. He bought it with
dual booting in mind and I saw no way to install Linux on that machine.
I am not new to installing Ubuntu. I have installed on more than 100
machines so far. I am using an older Acer notebook with Ubuntu 11.04
installed to write this e-mail. Could just be a faulty BIOs but 2hrs is
to long to install anything and I don't install Windows or repair it for
anyone any more. Acer notebooks are no longer on my recommended list
least someone suggests something that I have not tried.

Do you mean that you can't get into the BIOS setup? It might help if you gave an
exact identification of the computer, "Acer One" narrows it down to about a
thousand different computer models.

Of course you are right. I could not get into the bios setup or boot
order. I did not copy down the model number. The computer is what they
are selling at Walmart today. it is the netbook in their display, an
Aspire One.

I have no problem with my AOA mODEL ZG5 on the label on u.s. computer.
You will find a serirs of tweaks worth knowing on the Acer Aspire One Forum:
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum and
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne and http://www.aspireoneuser.com/

I still have the Linpus installed but I don't use it. This is Natty Ubuntu
11.04 with Unity and is superb!

Back in and before the 80s and probably the 90s a Briggs and Stratton
engine on a lawn mower. The engine would out last the deck it came on.

A few years back I purchased two self-propelled walk-behind lawn
mowers from Walmart. They had a little bit different Briggs and
Stratton engine but basically the same. A couple of years later
neither will run right. Either the engines are special low cost jobs
just for Walmart, to have that cheaper than thou price, or new Briggs
and Stratton small engines are bad. Walmart is big enough, too big for
my britches, to probably have B&S make a more cost effective engine
just for them. Either way, I will never buy another major purchase for
Wally-World and I will never buy another piece of equipment with a
Briggs and Stratton engine one it. When mentioning I had priced a
Husqvarna rotate tiller. On with a B&S engine and one with a Honda.
Both people knew more about power equipment than I and both
immediately said go with the Honda even with a price tag that was $100
more.

What I'm saying is I believe Walmart is big enough and buys enough to
have companies make special modifications to the products that cuts
the cost to them. It may look the same, have almost the same model
number, as somewhere else but is it? Having computers manufactured
with a special BIOS so the OS cannot be easily changed, modified or
added to will save them the hassle of having deal with PCs returns
that someone like you or I have messed up by installing Linux. Another
vendors netbook may work fine. A few year ago I purchased an ACER
Asprie One, or is that One Asprie, anyway I had no trouble adding
Ubuntu to it. Last summer, 2010, I purchased a ASUS netbook from Best
Buy and had no problems adding Ubuntu 10.04, currently 10.10.

I find that a strange notion. If you put Ubuntu on a Windows computer it
divides the drive leaving the windows partition intact and put a Grub
boot sequence on so you can choose which one to boot from How did you try.