Problem

Most Acer laptops and netbooks shipped with eRecovery feature. It stored its operating system and your computer’s drivers software in a hidden partition on the hard drive. My Acer laptop did not come with CDs. So if you did not make a backup CD, you will lost all your Acer programs and drivers if your hard drive is replaced.

Solution

Before you can restore your Acer computer, you should use the eRecovery to create a backup disks. There is a small key with “e” on top on my Acer Aspire 5000 laptop. By pushing the “e” key, eRecovery manager pops up. Creating a backup disks in the eRecovery manager is of straight forward.

My problem came at time of restoring software to a different hard drive. The hard drive was a used one with two partitions. I put the backup DVD into the DVD drive and started up the Acer. It booted into the DVD drive OK. Then it warned me on formatting the hard drive. Then it erorred out, complaining that it could not read or create a file. It was two frustrated days with different backup CD sets with the same result.

After Googled this problem extensively, I saw one post with different problem with eRecovery. The author stated that deleting all hard drive partitions solved his problem. So I put a regular Windows XP CD into the CD ROM drive. Proceed with Windows installation. I exited the Windows XP installation after I deleted all hard drive partition.

Then I rebooted the computer to my eRecovery DVD. Without any partitions on the hard drive, eRecovery went on to format my hard drive and put all original software on the computer. The computer was restored in less than an hour.

Summary

The trick of successful eRecovery is removing all hard drive partitions before restore.