Acer eRecovery Management

Firstly, hello all,
Not sure if this is the correct forum to post my problem but as this is a software forum and I trying to solve an Acer eRecovery Management issue I thought I'd try here first.

I have an Acer One netbook which has been slowing down lately (after 3 years, so not so bad!) I decided to reinstall the operating system using Acers on-board eRecovery Management software...
It gave me 3 options...

A) Completely restore system to factory defaults
Restore Operating system and retain User Data
C) Reinstall Drivers or Applications


After backing up the hard drive for safety, I chose option B. It clearly stated "Restore only the operating system of your PC to the factory defaults. Files from your user accounts will be transferred to c:\backup1
This option will not remove persistent viruses or malware (Reboot needed)"

The process went smoothly and took under an hour. Windows started up as it did the first day I bought it.
However when I went to c:\backup1 there was no such folder. What was there was c:\backup. Inside this folder are two folders 'All users' and 'Rose' (this is my wife's pc) The 'All Users' folder has a desktop folder, shared docs, start menu folders etc, just regular default stuff that's always there.
The most promising folder (Rose) says 'empty folder' when the mouse hovers over it, and clicking on properties shows 0 Bytes, 0 files and 0 folders. When I try and open this folder it says 'Not accessible, Access is denied'

I would have just gone ahead and reinstalled the backup I made earlier but the (160GB) hard drive shows 142GB total size and 49GB free space. So I'm sure that the data is in there somewhere because even Windows can't be taking up 93Gb of space on a fresh install.

Many thanks in advance for any help you can be.

Danny

P.S. I contacted Acer by telephone, they say that they see this all the time, and can definitely fix the problem... for $149.99

SOLVED

Hi all,

I just wanted to update this post. After looking and looking and asking around I figured it out...

The folder with my wife's username DID have all of her back-up in there, despite saying 0 folders and 0 bytes.
The folders ownership / permissions had to be reset to allow me access.
To do this I had to go into 'safe mode' and then change the settings / ownership of the folder.
Go back to regular windows and open the folder, inside will be all of your profiles, program settings, desktop stuff etc etc.
'Move' these folders to where they belong and overwrite or replace.

I hope that if anyone else is having the same problem that I am they will be able to save the $149.99 that Acer wants to charge them.
It took me about 20 minutes to get access to the folder and another 40-60 to put everything back where it belonged (but I'm sure there's a better way to do that too)

Danny

SOLVED