Partitioning and reinstalling windows.

Hi,

I recently purchased an Acer Travelmate 4200 for school purposes. I intend to have dual operation systems of Windows XP and a version of Linux. I want to get rid of the PQSERVICE partition, combine it with the D: partition and resize the D: to a smaller partition and use the remainder (15gb) for the linux os.

However the C: drive is between the PQService and D: and I am unable to merge them so I was going to format all the drives and re partition into 2 for windows and a unallocated space for linux.

I did not receive a windowsxp cd with my acer so I am using the one I got with my PC a couple of years ago to boot from the CD and reinstall windows. However when it is preloading the drivers for the install it returns a system error giving a list of options on what to do. I have tried most of these and to no avail it is always coming back up.

Can anyone please give some advice. Shouldn't my Acer come with a Windows XP cd?

Thanks in advance
quatro

 

The Acer comes with a factory restore cd. You don't get a WinXP disc. You can use programs like partition magic to deal with the partition changes you want, but the PQSERVICE partition is your recovery, I believe. Make sure that you know what you are doing if you want to get rid of that.

 

As far as I know, you either get recovery CD plus windows system CDs, or simply get recovery partition. In the latter case, usually there is software installed in factory setup in windows that you can use to burn CDs out of recovery partition so that it is no longer needed to be there.

As gautam3 said, be careful if you want to remove recovery partition entirely.

If you have already removed it, best way is to ask for restoration from the vendor. How they restore it I don't really know but worse case is to replace hard disk for you, in which case you may want to upgrade to a bigger disk since they are so cheap now.

Ok, now you can burn CDs out of recovery partition, repartition the whole disk, recover windows into the smallest possible partition, and install linux into the rest. Have fun in your school!

 

It seems like every day we answer this question here. How about the community make an Acer FAQ about drive partitioning, backing up data, and reinstalling xp with and or without the default restore capabilities?

A simple search shows up every time we talk about this.

From yesterday - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=92085
From the day before - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=85991
And even earlier - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=46457

If you search for PQService in the fourms you find thread after thread like this. We need to help these people before they screw up their pc's and ask for help, or inform them of what to do prior to messing with their partitions!

Every thread when searching for PQSERVICE is "Help" or "Urgent" or "What do I do now" etc. - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=46457

At least give them the knowledge and tools of what possibly might go wrong and the steps required to fix it. I'm just seeing a pattern of misinformed people taking irreversable steps that they themselves could not fix without the help from acer etc.

--ssx--