Thanks for your replies. I looked on the ACER tech support site and it also mentioned the <ALT>+<F10> menu. It worked, but when the "recovered" XP starts it goes into the consistency check mode and so far has found two errors that it corrected and now seems stuck:
correcting error in index $130 for file 1468 (twice)
sorting index $130 for file 1468.
Now it's stuck at 12 percent.
