Acer PQSERVICE problem

[Whoop]

Hi all,

I have an Aspire 5050 laptop which has been setup for dual boot XP/Vista but the XP partition has died of viruses (its not my lappy ).

The person who owns it has tried to recover the OS from an a 2cd set they made when they first bought it but I think because they then partitioned and installed the free vista upgrade it has all gone a bit wrong.

The PQSERVICE hidden partition which I believe to be the only way to recover the system has been added to disk management as a normal drive and no longer works, they don't give a system restore cd out with them so we are out of ideas.

Anyone got any good ideas or ways round this? It has all its legal keys and although we could probably find an XP and clean install it we would rather use Acer recovery.

Thanks,


Whoop

 

[bledd]

you can use an xp oem disc to install it again (pro or home depending what the COA sticker says on it) acer use standard keys

 

[sWiZzLe]

I have a question also regarding this rather annoying PQSERVICE.

I bought an Acer with Vista on it but would like to put XP64 on the first partition and Vista on the second. The problem is, is that the PQSERVICE forces the install onto the first partition.

Is there anyway to get around this? If i installed XP64 on to the second partion would it be bootable after recovering Vista?

 

[Roland0]

Whoop: there is no way that you can perform a recovery now that you have changed the MBR (master Boot Record) NOT even if you have the CDs!!! theoretically the only Legal way restore it would be to send it back to acer to sort out for £50.... but if you can get a disk with the original OS on it you can install it using the original CD Key, and then do the upgrade again...

Swizzle: You can remove the PQSERVICE by using partition magic or Gparted. The only thing that you will miss by doing this, is the crappy Acer eRecovery system, that reformats the C:\ partition and reinstalls the OS with all the drivers etc, when you press "Alt+f10" at startup.

Im sure that you will be ok if you have your own copy of XP/Vista, and can install drivers, just make sure u can download the drivers from the Acer Website, or that you can find them elsewhere, and 3rdly that the drivers work. Because if they dont the only way that you can get it sorted is to send it back, to Acer and they will charge you £50.00 for the privilege!!! Just a heads up.....

 

[sWiZzLe]

Thanks,

I recovered the Vista install - couldn't get the Pqservice one to work so deleted it and used the backup DVD i made. I now know why my first impression of Vista was so low.
The version that came with my Acer was Home Basic The absolutley no frills, no Aero version. I now have Vista64 on it and so far.... i love it