benshead

Background

I have spent years (literally) grumbling about the hidden ‘PQSERVICE’ partition that ships on every new Acer computer. My school has been a fairly loyal customer of Acer’s over the years and with good reason. Their combination of value and build quality have made their laptops and desktops reasonably good investments for our Windows-dependent school.

But back to PQSERVICE. When one tries to delete it, it proves to be tenacious. It is an EISA partition and Windows will try to prevent you from removing it. Even after you’ve done so, your MBR and boot.ini file are screwed up and other boot-related errors crop up. I had searched and searched for a procedure to follow that would work, but never found one. Now, I think I’ve figured it out and want to share. This post is an attempt to document one way for removing the PQSERVICE partition. I make no promise that it will work for you. In fact, it could certainly make your computer unusable, so please proceed with backups and caution. Iwould appreciate any feedback that you have on this post. If you have something to add, please do.

Why Delete It?

First of all, if you don’t need to, don’t delete PQSERVICE. Reclaiming the 4GB it takes up is not reason enough. If you depend on Acer’s recovery tools, it is also necessary. But there are some valid reasons to remove the hidden partition. I use Fog Server to image computers in my school. It can do an unresizable full-disk image or a resizable single-partition image from the first partition.  Having a resizable partition gives me flexibility to use drives that are smaller than the original as replacements. The stack of 20 and 40GB drives in my closet just became more useful! Also, there may be some performance to be gained by moving your OS partition to the first slot, as that resides on the outer edge of the physical disk, which is reputed to be faster.

Instructions after the jump…

Note, I have only done this with C: and D: drives that are formatted NTFS. Older Acers will have one or both formatted FAT32. While this may work fine, I haven’t tested it on them. You might want to use convert.exe to convert them first (after backing up the computer, of course).

Procedure

1. Create a Full Backup of your Computer

   I can’t stress this enough. You are about to (a) delete a partition, (b) mess with the MBR, and (c) edit the registry. If you do not do a full backup of the computer you run the risk of losing everything.

   I use Fog Server for imaging and deploying computers (a subject of a future post), so I was able to quickly take a full image of computer and move on to the next step.

2. Edit c:\boot.ini

   This is easy, but you want to be sure not to mess up. Boot.ini is a configuration file for NTLDR, which allows a user to specify which OS gets booted at startup.

   It is a hidden, write-protected system file, so the first thing is to select ”Show hidden files and folders” and deselect “Hide protected operating system files” in folder view options and that “Read-only” option is unchecked under file properties. You can open it in Notebook or any text editor.

   The standard one looks like this:

   [boot loader]
   timeout=30
   default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
   [operating systems]
   multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

   for now, we’ll copy the last line, hit return, and paste it in, altering only the partition number. This will allow you to boot into either partition 1 or 2. Since we are about to delete the current first partition, our bootable partition will become the first partition and its much easier to prepare for that than fix it later. Your boot.ini should look like this:

   [boot loader]
   timeout=30
   default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
   [operating systems]
   multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
   multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

   Save the file and close it.

3. Edit the Windows Registry

   Run regedit (Start menu > ‘Run…’ > regedit)

   Enter HKLM\System\MountedDevices and delete all entries. This will force your computer to re-create it’s list of Mounted disks when it next boots.

   Enter HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager and select the ‘BootExecute’ record. Delete the line that says “auto check autochk *”

4. Boot into GParted (or other partition editor)

   I used GParted‘s live boot cd to delete the offending partition, but you could use anything similar.

   Be sure to delete the first partition, labelled ‘PQService’ and then resize the second partition to fill the space left behind.

5. Fix MBR in Windows Recovery Console

   I used a Window’s install disk to boot into the recovery console. It should be noted that although you need a Window’s install disk to do this, it doesn’t seem to need to be one that came with the computer or, even, the same brand computer.

   It does appear that there other ways to repair an MBR. MBRFix gets consistently good reviews, though I haven’t tested it. Here’s another approach that looks promising.

   Here are instructions for using fixmbr from the Recovery Console [Microsoft'sTechNet]:

   1. Insert the Windows XP Professional Setup CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive.
   2. Restart the computer. If prompted to press a key to start the computer from the CD-ROM, press the appropriate key.
   3. When the text-based part of Setup begins, follow the prompts. Press the R key to repair a Windows XP Professional installation.
   4. If you are repairing a system that has more than one operating system installed, from the Recovery Console choose the Windows XP Professional installation that you need to repair.
   5. When prompted, type the Administrator password.
   6. To replace the MBR, at the Recovery Console command prompt, type:

      fixmbr

   7. Press the Y key to proceed, or press the N key to cancel.

6. Reboot

   When you reboot into Windows, NTLDR will ask you which Windows installation to boot from. Because of the boot.ini that we saved in Step #2, you will want to choose the second (non-default) option.

7. Edit c:\boot.ini (again)

   Now we can edit boot.ini again. We’ll set the first partition as the default and remove the second partition as an option. The file will look like this:

   [boot loader]
   timeout=30
   default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
   [operating systems]
   multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

   When you’re done editing, be sure to reset it as read-only in file properties.

8. Edit the Windows Registry (again)

   Re-open regedit and return the “auto check authochk *” line to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\BootExecute

9. Reboot

   chkdsk will probably run before Windows boots. It has never had to fix any errors for me and only runs the first time the computer reboots.

10. Finish Up

    At this point you could repartition your disk with GParted. Remove the D: drive, split it into two, etc.

References & Resources

• Fog Server
• boot.ini
• Editing the registry with regedit
• HKLM\System\MountedDevices
• HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\BootExecute
• GParted Live CD how-to
• fixmbr