Acer recovery partition... found by accident :)

Not a problem but might help others... Aspire 9301 notebook

I upgraded from X.P. to Vista nearly 3 years ago, and finally did a clean Vista install on a formatted partition earlier this year... something I should have done at the start.

Anyway, in doing that all I realised I would lose the ERecovery options etc...

Now, I use Acronis for running backups on the D parition to take the place of the "old" Acer utility that was with XP.
I have tried (out of curiosity) to see if the hidden partition was still accessible on occasion (F10 etc at boot) but nothing ever showed.

Discovered this... I use Acronis on occasion to make a full backup and then install trial stuff and generally have a good "play" knowing I can go back to the clean image made before... only this time without thinking I clicked "cancel" on the Acronis restoration a couple of minutes in... don't ask why I did it ... and found that (of course) there was now no operating system installed.
Panic... then remember that Acronis disc is bootable so I should be able to access backups OK.
So did a forced shutdown (holding power button) with view to changing the boot order in BIOS to boot from CD, HOWEVER, on doing that it launched into Windows XP full recovery with all the options... restore to as new etc.... which came as a total surprise.
I didn't and used Acronis to reinstall from my backup... but seeing XP come up was a real shock... so it's still there and usable apparently.