Haven't seen this here before

I have an Acer 5610-4610 system. It was repartitioned to one XP drive for several years. I am finally wanting to put the PQ service partition back on it but none of the folders of the restore CD's have any of the files needed to recreate this partition. I am wanting to put the factory (VISTA Home Premium) system on C. With all the system files and folders from the 3 restore CD's into the PQSERVICE partition. I have no clue how to proceed.

I do remember there was an acer(C) partition and a data (D) partition when I got it. The PQSERVICE partition was there back then.
The first (System) CD has none of the files mbrwrdos.exe or rtmbr.bin
used to create the PQSERVICE system.

I run the ACER Disk Formatter and it cannot find any drives on the laptop.

Weird! From what I've been able to glean my thought was that that the Formatter disk would facilitate creating the correct partitions?

Tell me what it's for if not that.


Mark

 

If you've got a Vista boot CD available, you can use the MS utility DISKPART to partition the drive yourself. Let me look back and find the files I was inspecting a few months ago...

Post 381 in this thread starts my research into how Acer builds the XP Home installation from the files in the PQSERVICE partition. These examples were from a recent AR1600 Revo system in late 2009.

 

Here are the DISKPART commands specified in their \\PQSERVICE\Rytools\ directory in the files NAPP2P.ini and NAPP2P_SetHidden.ini:

NAPP2P.ini:
select disk 0
create partition primary size=68837
assign letter=N
format fs=ntfs label="ACER" quick override
create partition primary
assign letter=O
format fs=ntfs label="DATA" quick override

NAPP2P_SetHidden.ini:
select disk 0
select partition 1
set id = 12 override
exit

 

I'm not exactly sure I follow you. Are you saying to use Diskpart to create these partitions? If so what size should the hidden partition be?

I figure it was probaby close to 8 or 9 gig originally?

I did noticve in a file called stcdboot.iso file there in the root of the first recovery CD (System) The iso file I extracted with winrar and found a rytools directory there but no napp2.ini or napp.ini

There is a file called partdisk.ini that contains this instruction set
select disk 0
select partition 4
delete partition NOERR
select partition 3
delete partition NOERR
select partition 2
delete partition NOERR
create partition primary size=30000
active
create partition primary
assign letter=U
exit

And there is a file called called partdisklabel.ini containing this instruction set
select disk 0
select partition 2
delete partition NOERR
select partition 2
delete partition NOERR
select partition 2
delete partition NOERR
create partition primary size=1500
select partition 2
active
create partition primary size=30000
create partition primary
assign letter=U
exit

This apparently happens through some scripting of some kind and this boot cd does not have any options to exit to a command prompt. I do have a vista boot cd created from an online iso file for repairing vista.

I could use it to run diskpart but I am thinking that those 2 files I mentioned above may change this anyway.

I have been doing some research on Acers site and found out that my model does not support e-recovery, yet my bios has D2D recovery enabled. I don't know why, so I disabled it.

Any ideas?

 

You can use either a Vista or Windows 7 boot disk to obtain a command prompt using CTRL+F10, then manually run Diskpart from there. Typically, the PQSERVICE restore partition is 10 gigabytes, but it only requires 8 or 9 gigabytes of that. The remainder of the disk is configured as either a single partition or two partitions, depending on how recent the laptop is. My AS5315 laptop had a single C: partition, but my AR1600 Aspire Revo nettop had a C: system partition and a D: data partition.

Also, the reason Acer used N: and O: is for their standardized NAPP build process. I believe they eventually re-assign those using Diskpart where one becomes PQSERVICE/hidden and the other becomes C:.

 

OK, here's the deal. I have any number of ways to make a 10GB partition that's not a problem. How to put the files needed into it and make it hidden bootable through Alt-F10. That's what I wonder about. I am attaching a few screen shots of the CD's I have for the system from ACER. My model is an Aspire 5610. It is 2+ years old.
In the first picture notice the STCDBOOT.ISO file. I have sent imagres of that in the next post.

Any insight would help.

 

The STCDBOOT.ISO file was burned to a separate CD so I could see what was in it. You might be surprised. I found the RYTOOLS folder and some other folders as well. I will put those screen shots up as well. Maybe then I can get serious about how to tackle this
rebuild of the PQservice partition.