W500 - getting an error trying to run erecovery - tablet is off warrantee

Trying to do a factory reset on a W500 that's been out of my hands, someone might have tried to install a non-standard image on it. It won't boot. Trying to run the DVDs that came with it, I get "There is insufficient space on the disk for the temporary files required for this operation". Doesn't erecovery reformat the SSD?

After I get this message, I booted off a retail windows 7 install CD, and go to the command prompt, I find two partitions. C: is labeled ACER, and is only 100 mb. has no label, has the rest of the drive space, and is about half full. The file system can be read, I can do a DIR and see lots of stuff. Is this normal? Could someone with a working W500 confirm that theirs is partitioned this way? is Erecovery trying to write to C:, but it's only 100 meg? It sure didn't erase d:. If I deleted all partitions and tried again, do you think that'd work? I'm reluctant to remove the ACER partition until I know what Acer does with it.