I'm pretty much a noob at this stuff. The computer is about 7 months old. I *think* it received some kind of update from MS over night. The next morning it told me to reboot. I did and was presented a non-booting system.
When I bought the machine I did a USB backup. I have tried to restore from that multiple times with no luck.
Here's some of the steps I've done and their results. Mind you that these are steps I knew nothing about but gatherered from different posts on the web.
I turned off the machine. I inserted the USB drive. I restart the machine and at the Acer logo I started hitting the F2 key. I got into the BIOS and went over to Boot. I made sure that the Toshiba-XXX (whatever the thing is) drive was listed first. It's a Toshiba jump driver.
The I saved and exited and then rebooted the computer. It asked for my language, I selected US-EN (or whatever that one is). I tried reset but keep my files. I tried reset and erase everything. I tried the option for fixing startup. Nothing worked. I always came back to the same thing.
so then I boot into jump drive and selected Advanced Mode.
From there I went to Command Prompt. At the command prompt I typed: chkdsk /f C:
It says it fixed some things and that nothing further was required. I shut it down, removed the jump drive, and still no booting.
I reboot and rerun the chkdsk command. No errors. Still can't boot.
I go back into Command Prompt via the USB (another reboot), and type: sfc /scannow
That finds no errors but says it can't continue (after getting to 100%).
Reboot and go back into Command Prompt, and type: diskpart
Here is what I have on that screen (sorry for horrible formatting)
On Computer: MININT-4LOUJC2
List Disk Size Free Dyn Gpt
Disk 0 Online 931GB 0B *
Disk 1 Online 29GB 0B
So Disk 0 is the HDD and Disk 1 is the USB. Then I type:sel disk 0
Partition ### Type Size Offset
Partition 1 System 100MB 1024KB
Partition 2 Reserved 16MB 101MB
Partition 3 Primary 930GB 117MB
Partition 4 Recovery 500MB 931MB
Next I type: attributes disk
Current Read-Only State : No
Read-Only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No
And finally I type: list volume
Volume ### Ltr Label FS Type Size Status Info
Volume 0 E DVD Partition 0B No Media
Volume 1 C Acer NTFS Partition 930GB Healthy
Volume 2 ESP Fat32 Partition 100MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 3 Recovery NTFS Partition 500MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 4 D RECOVERY Fat32 Partition 29GB Healthy
After that last one, I went back and rebooted. Under Advanced Options (I think that is where it was) there was an option to reset from a drive. I chose that as I was attempting to recover from the USB. I went through the setting up phase (2%, 16%, 20%, ...). Then it restarted and I got to the part where it says:
"Installing Windows
Your PC will resrart several times. Sit back and relax
1%
Installing features and drivers 2% Configuring settings"
That's it. It's been there since last night. It's well over 12 hours now. This is the same place I was at 2 days ago when I first tried restoring. It does not get past this point.
I know (hope???) that I'm just doing something wrong for the recovery media to work. It says the drive is healthy (both recovery on the HDD and on the USB list as healthy). I am SOOOOO very new to this type of stuff.
Is there a way to recover my laptop without having to send it back to Acer? Can I recover from the USB? Is there a way to recover from the HDD recovery media directly?
I am sorry for such a long post. I want to include as much information as possible. As I said, I am new to recovery. I do not even know what those commands I typed actually mean. But on those other boards people said it was useful information so I thought I should include it.
If anyone can help it would be very much appreciated. And if you could make the steps as easy as possible to follow and understand that would be uber-awesome. Talk to me like I'm a 10 year old (I would have said 12 but when it comes to computers most 12 years old smoke me in regards to talent 
).
Thank you in advance for any help you can give.
