I have the recovery CDs that I made when I first got my Acer laptop. Apparently the Acer Inspire has a HD partition. Acer has an eRecovery stystem that you can access by pressing alt-F10 and you have two options: Rstore and back up data and restore which wipes all data. I chose the first option which has failed. Maybe I’ll try the 2nd option of restoring and wiping all data…?