I realize this response is years later, but someone may be in a similar boat these days or in the future.
YOU CAN TRANSFER THE ACER RECOVERY SETUP TO A NEW DRIVE.
I had to recently 'fix' my Mother in laws laptop where the drive seemed to be irrecoverably damaged in the area used by the OS partition (preventing boot and even chkdsk from being successful... but allowing some files to be read when mounted externally, and the recovery partition(s) were readable. Chosen answer was to replace the damaged drive with a new one, and may as well go SSD in the process.
The original ACER laptop drive had 3 partitions – 2 normally not mounted [a] 100MB, 14GB, and 1 mounted for the normal OS /boot partition (size using the remainder of the 500GB drive). Due to the damage I was unable to completely clone the old drive to the new one, but *was* able to clone the two unmounted and undamaged partitions to the new drive - effectively transferring the ACER recovery setup and then successfully using it to re-install the OS and factory settings on the new drive via the Alt-F10 approach once re-installed in the laptop. Subsequently personal files need to be restored and applications re-installed of course, but that was doable.
Here are some observations:
• Partition Order: The *order* of the partitions on the new drive must match the order on the original ACER drive. I first did the cloning out of order and although the ATL-F10 did start the recovery process it targeted the wrong partition to install the OS on and could not proceed (nor change the target partition). I’m guessing that the target partition is always the next one after the recovery partition accessed via ALT-F10 so ORDER DOES MATTER. If you do it wrong, then delete the new partitions and start again. I think I manually created the third partition on the new drive (simple NTFS) and formatted it, but that may or may not be necessary.
• Drive Sizes: My drive sizes were not the same (orig 500GB, SSD only 250GB), but this was not a problem for the ACER recovery process on the new drive, simply installed Win 7 into the available smaller partition.
• Driver issues with vanilla Win 7 Install: Like some people I had also tried to install a fresh Win 7 from commercial install disks, but there were two issues. [1] not sure the activation using the key from the laptop was working [2] the reason I could not tell is that the drivers for the laptop were not set up properly via the vanilla install and could not get to the net. Looking at the device manager mainly the network drivers seemed to be problematic, but ACER seems to have a bunch of atypical stuff and if you can’t get to the net to get specific drivers it’s a pain. Don’t know if there might be a way of accessing driver info from the unmounted partitions, but seems iffy. Could download on separate computer and use a USB key, but again ugly.
Anyhow, it can be done and although I had to take the drive in and out of the laptop 2 more times than necessary I’m more confident comfortable with the resulting OS install. (side note: bloody Acer laptops while user accessible are something of a PAIN to access. 24 screws on the underside of mine all needed to come out as the entire bottom comes off, and I didn’t want to test or install with a partial reassembly as without the bottom the battery would not seat and you’d have nothing for it to safely sit on. At least I didn’t have to take out the keyboard etc.. so could be worse. )
I used a free version of EaseUS / To-Do software ([url=http://www.todo-backup.com/backup-resource/free-windows-7-clone-software.htm]Clone Windows 7 Hard Drive with Windows 7 Cloning Software - EaseUS[/url] )to do the cloning without difficulty which was cool. I may buy a basic copy in thanks as it’s not very expensive.
