So try a number of charity organisations that will recycle old PC kit, and they want money!!!!

My pet hate on many Windows systems is this restore bit. Too often it simply fails to work. It astonishes me that manufacturers are so stingy that they will not supply a DVD install disc or discs for their hardware when such discs cost them virtually nothing to produce compared to the retail price for the hardware or software associated with them. Another bugbear is manufacturers of Nvidia based graphics cards with HDMI outputs not supplying a tuppence ha'penny one foot long, 2 wire cable to attach them to the SPDIF audio output of a motherboard or sound card. Another is a manufacturer supplying kit that requires jumpers in some instances not supplying the required jumper.

`i believe that on acer you are supposed to create 3 discs when you first run the machine.
2 for the recovery and 1 for the drivers.

it should have prompt you to do this or you could have created them from the start all programs acer menu.

Should have read the info that comes with the acer first.

Yeah I binned everything "Acer" when I got the machine and never made any DVD's.

If the restore partition is intact, all you need to do is unhide ( if it's hidden ) and then set that partition to active. Reboot your machine and it should then start up in the recovery partition.

I have successfully done this with 3 different Acer machines owned by friends.