I have some pix and documents on the data portion of the hard drive of my Acer 5102WLMi. What happens to these If I restore it to its original new condition. My drive is still in the three partitions as it came from Acer. I am considering doing a restore to factory setup to get rid of some error messages and restore the Epower Management software I lost somehow. Acer recommended it to restore the EPower settings.

If you do a full restore then you will lose that data as windows will delete the data from your harddrive. However if you have it set up for 3 partitions you can just delete the partition that contains your windows install and do a reinstall on that same partition without mucking up your current data found on another partition on your harddrive.

Possibly do a search for "restore with a partition"

I believe the Acer eRecovery program saves the first (C drive) partition. It is should not affect any data on the other paritions. (Though I've not seen the one with three partitions before.. I know in the two partition setup, the 2nd partition is not touched)

I thought it was standard in their laptops to have a C: drive for OS and D: drive which is for data and a small third partition where they store the recovery files. The last one is only 5 GB and the first two are 53 + GB. They are all in VFAT files. If you remove the recovery files partition then you can't recover from the hard drive or at all unlles you saved files to a DVD at beginning.

There is a 5 gig pre-partition that is Acer-proprietary. Mine had that and C and D. If you do a restore, the disk is formatted and reintalled. That will wipe your data. So you ought to write/backup that important data to CD, no matter what reinstallation process you choose.

Ah alright, I thought you meant 3 partitions not including the hidden one

I did a restore to factory state from Acer's aRecovery program for my Travelmate 2492. It left the D: partition ACERDATA untouched.

I dont know why Acer supply their PCs with the C: and D: partitions formatted as FAT32 rather than NTFS as you'd expect for XP.

The eRecovery program had no problem with the fact that I'd previously converted the two partitions to NTFS, although it did leave C: as FAT32 so I had to convert it to NTFS again after restoring.

Sadly the restoring was all a great big waste of time for me: I'm having problems with the sound on my TM2490 (see my thread "Acer Travelmate 2492 / Realtek HD Audio - distorted sound / Stereo Mix input muted") and Acer support wanted me to see what happened with a clean installation because I'd already tried Realtek's latest drivers (which Acer don't support) and then reinstalled the older Acer-supported drivers. Sadly, it didn't make a blind bit of difference... but I still had to endure reinstalling apps again and customising the PC to the way I like it. At least all the data on D: was left alone so I didn't have to SyncToy it across from my main PC again.

[quote=martinu]I did a restore to factory state from Acer's aRecovery program for my Travelmate 2492. It left the D: partition ACERDATA untouched.

I dont know why Acer supply their PCs with the C: and D: partitions formatted as FAT32 rather than NTFS as you'd expect for XP.[quote=martinu]


I heard it had something to do with the recovery files using a type of linux or unix that can only write to Vfat and not NTFS. I just wish Acer would be more supportive of running Linux on their hardwares like their Web Cam and internal card reader.

I did the restore twice now and it left data on D drive untouched. It also restored the EPower software to a functional state.

eRecovery seems to use a version of Norton Ghost that doesn't like NTFS