How do I restore an Acer Aspire 4730z to factory settings?

I have inherited an Acer Aspire 4730Z from my sister-in-law and want to restore it to factory settings to get rid of all her stuff. The F10 Acer disk-to-disk recovery function does nothing - and I did check to see that the D2D Recovery setting in Main is Enabled in the BIOS utility. When I press F10 it just goes right ahead and finishes booting up normally. The Acer folder in the Start menu that should contain the eRecovery Management program also does not exist.

I went to Acer Support and tried to order a eRecovery Disk and it said that none was available for neither the computer's SNID nor serial numbers.

What's going on? This computer was originally purchased in 2009.

Thanks for any suggestions.

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finlux

Hi Pedalpower

Restart your computer & press & hold ALT & F10. This should enter the eRecovery program. Alternatively, click start, all programs>Acer>Acer eRecovery Management, click restore & select the "Completely restore...." option.

If the hard drive has been replaced, then the eRecovery option will not be available. You will need to install Windows from a Windows disk. Is it Vista or Windows 7?

Go to the Acer support site for your region, click Drivers & Manuals, and enter your PC model. Download all the drivers for your Windows version to a USB stick/external hard drive or even burn them to disk. When you've re-installed Windows, install the drivers and apply Windows updates.

Then you're good to go!

Pedalpower

This Aspire 4730Z has Windows 7. I tried all the things the user's manual and you suggested. F10 during the Acer logo does nothing - normal boot-up continues. There is no Acer eRecovery program in the Start menu. Requesting an eRecovery disk in Acer support says that one is not available for my SNID/serial number unit?? Guess I'll try reinstalling Windows and downloading the drivers - if they exist for this unit. Thanks for your reply.

finlux

Looks like the recovery partition has been erased or the hard drive has been replaced.

Good luck and post back if I can be any more help...

Pedalpower

I just noticed that this unit has two Windows Key stickers on the back - one for Vista and another for Windows 7. Looks like it has been upgraded from Vista to 7. Would this upgrade have deactivated or erased the eRecovery feature and files?