I just bought a 12.1″ Acer TravelMate 6293 laptop to replace my big and bulky 15.4″ Acer TravelMate 4100. Initially I planned to buy Sony Vaio but it after comparing the price and specifications, Acer gives a better deal although I know that the quality of Acer is much lower than Sony Vaio. The quality and finishing doesn’t really matter so much to me because I am always using an external keyboard and mouse to avoid strain injury. I am only looking forward on the portability as it weighs less than 2KG and also it is using the latest Centrino2 processor with 2GB DDR3 ram which claims to draw less power and provide better performance.

The salesman told me that Acer no longer provides Recovery Disc to restore the system back to factory default anymore. I had to create them myself from Acer eRecovery Management with 2 DVD discs. The funny part is the salesman told me that the recovery disc can only be created ONCE. I was frightened by what the salesman said and I started to do a lot of research on the laptop recovery system.

I read a lot of forum posts and found that my Acer’s laptop hidden partition is totally different from what other people are getting. For example, many people has been successful to unhide the hidden EISA partition using Symantec’s PowerQuest Partiton Table Editor PARTEDIT32 tool. I’ve disabled D2D in BIOS and tried to set the hidden partiton type to 07 (Installable File System NTFS ,HPFS) but everytime after a reboot, the PQSERVICE partition will automatically be reverted back to the default type. I tried booting in to Safe Mode, the type shows 07 but I couldn’t see the hidden partition.

Then, another different issue is regarding reverting the MBR back to the original Acer’s default MBR. Let’s say the Acer laptop is preinstalled with Windows Vista. You hate using Vista and formatted the hard drive to reinstall Windows XP. By doing that, you’re actually wiping off the MBR records and you can never use the Alt+F10 to launch the eRecovery Management to perform system recovery. Fortunately on older laptops, this can be easily fixed by extracting the rtmbr.bin and mbrwrdos.exe file from the hidden PQSERVICE partition to restore the MBR to the original state. Weirdly, my Acer TravelMate 6293 PQSERVICE hidden partition doesn’t contain mbrwrdos.exe and rtmbr.bin files :(

To me, the current recovery method implemented by Acer and many other laptop manufacturers are just CRAPPY. No doubt that it is easy to restore the system back to factory state for basic computer users, but for a slightly more advance user (but not too geeky) who knows how to format a hard drive or mess around with partition, they could wrongly delete the PQSERVICE partition causing them unable to perform a system recovery. I guess many people also knows how to install Windows XP and by doing that, they’re wiping off the MBR and won’t be able to use the ALT+F10 hotkey during bootup to launch the Acer eRecovery Management. So if you screw up, you’ll have to fork out money to get the manufacturer to restore back the hidden PQSERVICE partition and the default MBR.

After reading a lot on forums regarding the hidden partition and MBR, I think it is VERY important that these steps are taken IMMEDIATELY to prevent from spending unnecessary money in bringing back the laptop to manufacturer to have them restored.

1. Create Recovery Discs
- Usually laptops that doesn’t come with recovery discs has to be manually created. In Acer, it can be done from Acer eRecovery Management. Even if you’ve accidentally deleted the hidden partition, can you still restore the system back to default state using the recovery discs.

2. Backup Master Boot Record
- If you’ve removed Vista and installed another operating system such as XP, but would like to revert back to Vista, you can restore the original MBR and hit the Alt+F10 hotkey during startup to launch the recovery system from the hidden partition. Here are 5 free tools that you can used to backup and restore MBR (Master Boot Record)

3. Backup EISA hidden partition PQSERVICE
- I’d say that this step is the most important of all. Having the hidden partition is better than having the recovery discs. There are many third party partition tools that can handle hidden partition but I found that the free version Macrium Reflect is an excellent free tool that is able to easily detect, backup and restore the hidden PQSERVICE partition. It even automatically backs up the Master Boot Record whenever you create a backup.

To backup PQSERVICE hidden partition. Run Macrium Reflect, right click on PQSERVICE partition and select Create Image of ’1 – PQSERVICE’.

Select a backup destination, you can backup to your local hard disk, network shares or even CD/DVD discs. Should take less than 20 minutes to backup the 13GB hidden PQSERVICE partition. Next time when you want to restore the backed up PQSERVICE partiton, simply create a Macrium Reflect Rescue CD (preferably Linux), boot up the computer with the rescue cd and load the image.

To view the contents of the PQSERVICE hidden partition, just double click on the backed up image file that you created with Macrium Reflect and check on the checkbox. It will amount the backup image on new drive letter.

You can now view the PQSERVICE contents from My Computer by accessing the mounted drive letter.

Once you have done all the 3 steps above and store the backups in the proper place (external drives, DVD discs and etc), you can pretty much do whatever you want on the laptop without having any problems in restoring the laptop’s system back to the original state.

[tags]MBR, PQSERVICE, partition, EISA, hidden[/tags]