Acer Arcade partition importance?

I have searched for other threads for this, but none had what I was looking for.

I want to delete the 3GB partition, which I found out has some Arcade program.
I never use it so i thought i might as well get those 3 gigs back.
My question is,can I safely delete that partition, or does it have any other important function(if it does what are they)

 

My experience:
A few months back, I was having issues with my D: partition.
As I was trying to restore it, I first deleted it. Then I took this opportunity to delete the Arcade one and created a new and bigger D: partition.
I did not have any isssue since then.

 

That 3GB partition is solely for Acer Arcade Instant-On - not sure if deleting it immediately would impact anything, but I would avoid pressing the Arcade Instant-On button on your machine afterwards just in case.

 

Thank you for the advice, I think I'll delete it. The truth is that until yesterday I didn't even know about the Instant-On feature

 

I personally found it rather annoying and unnecessary. Just make sure you've burned your Acer eRecovery DVDs in case you need to restore it, for some cockamamie reason.

 

There are typically two version of arcade on board

• A 'boot into player only' mode that uses that partition
• The standard Windows install player

The 'Boot into' player on mine wouldnt handle Blueray or HDMI, and the increased battery life was not noticable.
So I never replicated the partition or boot option on my clean install and the arcade button does nothing (although all the other media keys continue to work with the windows version of arcade deluxe)

A full disk image to an external HDD is the best bet before doing this sort of deletion as the acer recovery disks notoriously do not rebuild the partition structure (A napp disk is needed for that) and often stand helpless with MBR problems too. The last of the burned recovery disks does contain the windows installer for Arcade which is useful to have as you cannot download it officially.

 

Ok, I deleted it.
(I'll just ask in this thread, since i don't know if its still an ACER discussion)

I have a problem. I used Acronis disc director, and after i was done with everything, I now have the pqservice partition, C: and D: partitions, and now a new partition i made(30gb). Now the problem is, that I can make that partition the same as C and D, but after I restart pc, it reverts into a EISA partition, and I cant do anything with it.

Tried deleting it with acronis, then with vistas Diskpart, but nothing works. I can make it unallocated, but if i give it a drive letter, it simply reverts back to EISA after a restart.


Any help would be appreciated

 

You are having a fight with the Acer MBR functionality which is trying to hide and reset the partition it thinks is the hidden Arcade partition

I would have suggested making that full disk image . . so you can have 50 goes at getting this right.

From here your best simple strategy is to shrink the partition that keeps getting EISA'd to a few MB and leave it empty. Untidy but perfectly OK

Alternatively (I would say only wise if you already have a full system image for emergency use/selling the laptop later) forget the recovery and Acer partition space - just restore the appropriate Windows MBR with a retail Windows install disk for your operating system. How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows

This will disable both the Alt-F10 recovery and Media Player boot which will stop this behaviour and let you regain maximum disk space.

When you have it all working and your programs are all working etc make another full disk image with Paragon Backup and restore or similar. This is a far superior recovery strategy for non-warranty use and will work quickly even on a brand new HDD delivering a clean system that is a lot closer to usable than the factory install (generally lacking all your programmes and about a GB of patches etc !)

 

If I shrink that partition as you suggested, how can I then make another Primary partition, since from what i understand, I can't have more than 4(which I do).

I don't quite understand your second suggestion, and anyway I didn't get a WIndows install disk with my pc.

 

Sorry I forget to say about primary partitions, after 3 (to be including the OS partitions) create an extended partition (counts as the 4th) that can contain several further logical partitions within it.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/structPartitions-c.html not 100~% sure why you are needing that many though . .

You can find links to download ISOs of most windows retail disks . . take the usual care to avoid ones with little extras . . There are some useful MD5 checksum verification tools for windows ISO's around to keep you sane. not a piracy issue you are not going to install windows - just use the generic windows MBR repair tools on the disk

 

Oh of course! When I deleted my Arcade partition, I had already overwritten Acer's MBR with the standard Windows one when I reinstalled Vista!
And even then, I just extended D: into the empty space.

 

Oh ok. I'll try to find a Vista ISO. Will do a clean install- should also get rid of all the crapware that came preinstalled.

thanks

 

If you want rid of the crapware yes . . but remember you need the exact same OS version if you want to ask/beg MS to activate it using the key on the sticker on the bottom.

Remember that you WILL want to reinstall Acers custom sound driver, launch manager (buttons & on screen displays), WebCam app, Chipset inf files and arcade player so you need a usable Drivers and applications DVD burnt before you start clean installing . . Worth looking at device manager for a list/screenshot of exact hardware complement and driver versions as it makes life easier than doing your clean install and being faced with 'unknown device' there

 

For drivers and such, I think they are backed up along with the recovery discs(on seperate cd), but I'll just download them from the acer support site to be sure.
As for the activation, I think I should be able to get around it with ABR, but I have to check that again.

 

The recovery disk is the only place you will legitimately find the acer arcade prog and sometimes others like epower.

Re ABR, it may indeed work . . . i'm saying nothing . .

 

Remember, the recovery DVDs and Driver & Applications DVD are different things. Burn both.