Aspire 5920 hidden partitions

My laptop has four primary partitions on the hard disk. All partitions are NTFS format. I am aware from other posts that the first partition, a hidden partition labelled "PQSERVICE", contains the Acer Disk to Disk (D2D) recovery image which holds the Windows install files etc. On my Acer Aspire 5920 (3A2G16Mi) this partition is 9.7GB with 8.8 GB used. Then I have two 60-70GB visible partitions (C and D drives).

Then my laptop has another unlabelled, primary, hidden partition at the end of the drive. This one is 3.2GB with 1.4GB used. What is this for?

I have burnt the eRecovery DVDs so I am happy to delete the first partition and get another ~10GB back on my drive but can I delete the last partition?

Just in case, I have backed up images of both the hidden partitions onto a network drive, so I can hopefully restore them if a disaster happens. I would like to have been able to get information about this from the Acer User Guide however all it tells me is the recovery "feature occupies 10 GB in a hidden partition", nothing about the other 3GB chopped off the end. Can anybody help?

 

Large hidden partition is for windows recovery & smaller one is for ACER media canter application(Quick boot partition)

You can't delete recovery partitions without deleting HDD MBR.All of your data will be lost & make sure to backup everything B4 deleting MBR

Make sure your recovery disks(DVDs) are working

Is your HDD made by HITACHI?

 

Thanks Bigspin, appreciate the help.

This takes up one and a half Gigs?? WTF?

I'm still not quite sure what you mean by media center application, but if I delete this small partition then I presume that means it will not boot into the D2D recovery facility when I press Alt+F10 on the boot screen? (Not that this is too important as I'll be deleting the big fat 10GB restore partition anyway and using the DVDs I burnt should I ever want to go back to a factory install - I sure hope they work!!)

I was planning to delete partitions 1 and 4 (the 10GB and 3GB hidden partitions, then update the MBR. This will keep partitions 2 and 3 intact (the C and D drives) so all my data and the windows installation should be fine. I will move partition 2 to the start of the drive (so it becomes partition 1) and put a boot loader onto it to make sure it writes the MBR as needed in order to boot into Windows. Don't think I've missed anything have I?

The hard drive is a Seagate Momentus.

Just in case anyone was wondering, I want to delete the hidden partitions because I want to put another OS onto the laptop and run dual boot. I need the space the recovery partitions take up and also would be restricted by the four primary partition limit per hard drive with the two (unnecessary) hidden recovery partitions. It's a work in progress... It has been hampered by the annoying practice of Laptop suppliers not supplying a Windows install disk and using hidden partitions on the hard drive without giving proper and full information about them.

 

Egghead -
I've got several posts over at Ubuntu forums. Search "5920".

Short version of my experience. I burned the Recovery DVD's first, thank God.
Then I tried to resize the partitions with GPartedLiveCD. Didn't work. vista wouldn't boot. Set up BIOS to boot from optical, tossed the #1 DVD in, saw "Windows Loading Files" then nothing. I didn't know about Alt+F10. A kid at Circuit City (place where I bought it) said to zero-fill the HDD. That was what I was kinda thinking too. While zero-filling I found out about Alt+F10. Stopped zero-fill at 60%. Went in with GParted LiveCD, which showed one unallocated partition.
Using Alt+F10 this time, it looked like the Recovery DVD was going to work, but then it came back with "Type mismatch" error. Took a guess and formatted entire drive to NTFS with GParted.
This time the Recovery DVD worked. I ended up with one C:\ partition. I was able to resize this partition with GParted. vista ran scandisk the first time that it booted, then worked fine. The little "eRecovery" gear in the Empowerment widget doesn't seem to work but I don't care. I have the Recovery DVD's if I ever have to start over. With just one partition I had lots of leeway for Linux. I ended up building one logical partition and building /, swap, and /home partitions inside that partition. Ubuntu installed just fine. I let GRUB install to the MBR and I get the choice of OS'es when the 5920 boots up.
Lster, another guy on the Ubuntu forums, had success but in a different way. He wiped out vista entirely by mistake. Not sure, but I think he lost all his recovery partitions.
Figuring he could always reinstall Ubuntu, he used GParted LiveCD to set up a smaller partition at the front of the HDD and formatted it to NTFS. His Recovery DVD's installed vista, but only to that smaller partition, not the entire drive!! That was a surprise.
I do NOT understand all the in's and out's of how the Acer D2D stuff works, how the partitions work, etc. All I can tell you is what worked for me and Lster.

Just my opinion, but I think the manufacturers are intentionally clogging up the HDD's with partitions to discourage people like us. I mean, really, did Acer have to make two recovery partitions and separate C:\ and D:\? I doubt it.

Now, for the bad news - Ubuntu doesn't seem to be running the drives in DMA and I don't know how to make that happen. The Intel 4965 wireless card works, but slower than in vista. Dual monitor software isn't as versatile as vista's. Ubuntu doesn't seem to be able to drive the left chassis speaker, but headphones sound fine.
I expect that next version of Ubuntu will fix all or most of these problems.

EDIT: I don't think you'd have to install a bootloader into the Windows partition. I didn't do anything like that.