Accessing PQSERVICE hidden partition

I have a travelmate 8104 which may have a slightly different PQSERVICE partition, but here's what I found...

By default, the BIOS and Acer's MBR code (the software in your master boot record) work together to try to keep your PQSERVICE partition "hidden". Typically, you'll see that the PQSERVICE partition is type 12h - which is marked as a diagnostic partition type.

In actual fact, your partition is probably type 0Bh or type 0Ch (Fat32).

The problem is that if you attempt to change the partition type from 12h to 0Bh, if you boot the HD again, the MBR code will set it back to 12h.

I used a bootable CDROM (with a win98 command prompt and DOS utilities) to change the partition to 0Bh. I used Partition Magic's PTEDIT to change the partition type. Once changed, I rebooted BACK TO THE CDROM (you got to do this before allowing the system to boot the HD). Now on the CDROM boot again, I can now see the files on the PQSERVICE partition.

At this point, I cheated. I renamed the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on the PQSERVICE partition to AUTOEXEK.BAT (or anything else other than autoexec.bat). Once renamed, I can use the laptop's ability to boot directly into the service partition (Alt-F10 on the TM8104), but the special D2D recovery software will NOT run because it can't find autoexec.bat.

Once you do this, you'll be sitting at a DOS C:> prompt on your PQSERVICE partition. Not much you can really do here, except see what's there. WARNING: If you boot the PQSERVICE partition to the C:> prompt, do NOT just Alt-Ctrl-Del to reboot! You should run autoexek.bat, then just abort the recovery process - which will do a "clean" reboot. The reason for this is that when you boot the PQSERVICE partition with Alt-F10, the MBR code will mark your extended partition as hidden, and the ONLY thing that restores your extended partition back is some code in the autoexek.bat file near the end. If you just Alt-Ctrl-Del out of the PQSERVICE partition back to WinXP, you'll find you don't have a "D:" partition because it's hidden.

What I did was first change the PQSERVICE partition to 0Bh (so it's not hidden). Then I used the Norton Ghost 2003 master CD (it's bootable) to backup the PQSERVICE partition to a partition file on an external USB harddrive. If you try to backup the PQSERVICE partition with Ghost when it's partition type is 12h, it will backup, but Ghost is smart and will refuse to restore it. It seems that Ghost knows about partition type 12h and will not allow you to restore it. But, if Ghost backs it up as type 0Bh, it works both for backup and restore; and once restored, you can use PTEDIT (or any other low level sector editor) to change the type back to 12h again.

I was able to backup my PQSERVICE partition, and then I restored it onto a completely different (and 100% empty) harddrive. Once restored on the new HD, I retagged the partition as type 12h, and then invoked the D2D boot (Alt-F10). After it was all said and done, I was able to get the D2D PQSERVICE partition to re-create a WinXP C: partition and it seems to come alive and work just fine.

Hope some of that helps,
Bit.

Gyus...
I did exatly the same thing with a 5652WLMi but couldn't enable Alt + F10...

What can i do???

Here is my complete post:

http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=138812

Well, I'm not sure if the Aspire PQSERVICE partition is exactly the same as my TM8104, but...

When I first got my system, the drive is partitioned like this:

1. Primary PQSERVICE partition, type 12h
2. Primary ACER partition, FAT32, type 0Ch
3. Extended partition, type 0Fh
... Logical ACERDATA partition, FAT32

If you get Alt-F10 to work, it will change partition 1 to type 0Bh (or 0Ch), and it will hide partition 3 by changing it to 1Fh. Booting the PQSERVICE partition hides partition 3 just in case any logical partitions are NTFS. The Win98-based PQSERVICE boot will go "nuts" if it sees NTFS partitions. Also, don't press Alt-Ctrl-Del or power off while running the PQSERVICE boot - it will leave your extended partition hidden. If you exit the PQSERVICE recovery software normally, it'll fix the partition and then reboot clean.

Also, PQSERVICE boot expects it to be in partition 1 (only), and it also expects another single primary FAT32 partition at slot 2. You can have any extended partitions (Fat32, NTFS, etc) as PQSERVICE doesn't care (because it marked your extended partion hidden so all the logical partitions are hidden as well).

In my TM8104 BIOS, there's an option called D2D enable. This must be set for Alt-F10 to work.

Also, if you re-installed WinXP, it would have overwritten the MBR (WinXP tends to do that nasty). This means you've lost the Acer-specific MBR code (unless you imaged the drive before installing WinXP). The Acer-specific MBR is what "notices" Alt-F10 and changes which partition to boot. You most likely now have the WinXP MBR code, which doesn't check for Alt-F10, so nothing will happen.

If you still have your PQSERVICE partition, and want to boot it, you still might be able to. You'll need a bootable CDROM (or bootable USB floppy drive) with Win98 command prompt and some utilities, like PTEDIT.

Note that PQSERVICE will NOT work if your partition 2 is now NTFS - it must be FAT32 for PQSERVICE to work correctly. (Note that partition 1 is hidden, and partition 2 is your OS, typically C: drive).

Once booted up in a DOS floppy or CDROM, you'll want to change the partition type of PQSERVICE from 12h to 0Bh. Also, you'll want to remove the boot flag from partition 2 and set partition 1 (PQSERVICE) to be bootable.

Now, if you reboot the laptop normally, it SHOULD boot the PQSERVICE partition. At this point, be careful, as I'm not sure how the Aspire PQSERVICE partition is setup, so you many want to do a full backup before trying to boot the PQSERVICE partition.

Hope that helps,
Bit.

Friend BitBasher,

i have already done what you have previously mentioned. I tried to boot the PQService partition (after it was unhidden) an also, nothing happend. At that time, the rest of the disk was unpartitioned. That could be a problem probably so the booting didn't work. Apart from that i then booted with a Win98 CDRom and finally managed to see the hidden partition as C:. Unfortunately i couldn't do much more cause there isn't any Autoexec.bat like in your Recovery partition . There is only one directory that could be helpfull named autorun and it seems like it works like a DVD image (i mean the hole partition). Apart from that, i burned the D2D directory to a CD and booted with it but also couldn't do much things as it automatically prompts the user to insert the DVD image that he has created at the 1st setup of the Laptop.

Anyway, i ghosted back the partitions that are working (Hidden + Windows XP Pro ENG **without the Arcade **) and i will wait for the Recovery CDs i order from Acer for the other Acer i have (5514WLMi). That laptop had Recovery CDs but somehow they were lost....by my boss!!!! Now i have to pay €50 for the CDs and i hope that the Acer Arcade will work from that other model...!!!

BitBasher thank you very much for your help anyway friend...!!!

I do agree, I think there are different versions of the PQSERVICE partition. It might be the Travelmate series is quite different than the Ferrari series.

For me on my Travelmate, partition 2 MUST be FAT32, and the logical partition (partition 3 sort of) doesn't matter - it's not used or referenced. I had converted my partition 2 (WinXP "ACER") to NTFS, and the eRecovery software said "no way dude".

And yes, I did receive my TM8104 with the factory HD setup as part1=PQSERVICE, part2=primary ACER, part3=logical ACERDATA. So, partition layouts between different Acer laptop models is obviously not the same.

I try to be careful using drive names like "C:" or "D:", because these are subjective. For example, if I boot the "ACER" partition WinXP, typically it's drive C: and my logical FAT32 partition "ACERDATA" is drive D:. This is somewhat the way WinXP can map drive letters. I can change my ACERDATA partition to anything, say drive Q: if I wanted. :P

But, from a "DOS" point of view, say I boot the PQSERVICE partition. Now, while living in the PQSERVICE partition boot world, now PQSERVICE is drive C:, my ACERDATA partition would be drive D:, and my ACER WinXP partition would be drive E:. This is the way "DOS" maps drive letters. But in actual fact, my flavor of PQSERVICE, when booted, marks the logical partition as hidden (it changes partition 3 from type 0F to type 1F) so it never sees the logical ACERDATA partition, and ends up only seeing itself as C: and WinXP ACER as D:.

One thing I haven't tried yet is to attempt a PQSERVICE restore if there are no other partitions on the drive. That is, I'm not sure yet if PQSERVICE recovery requires the other partitions to pre-exist, or will it create them if they don't exist.

Bit.

Bit

I double checked my Ferrari system and you are correct the Acer Data partition is in an extended partition (I also noticed that PQMagic reports the PQSERVICE partition as partition #0 !). However with my version C: can be FAT32 or NTFS and the logical partion (D: ACER DATA) can be accessed from the ALT+F10 option. This is useful facility as that is where eRecovery can place an image of the users current OS (which is restored as an NTFS if set) as an alternative to factory default system.

Extract from eRecovery Help file Ferrari version

"NOTE: The target HDD (drive D:\) must be formatted as FAT32 for the backup function to work. The Users can reformat the HDD to NTFS, but the Acer eRecovery backup function will be unavailable. Reformatting the C:\ drive to NTFS will not affect the operation of Acer eRecovery."

>>One thing I haven't tried yet is to attempt a PQSERVICE restore if there are no other partitions on the drive. That is, I'm not sure yet if PQSERVICE recovery requires the other partitions to pre-exist, or will it create them if they don't exist.<< It would be an interesting exercise !. (I'm chicken at this time).

Dave

Hmm, not chicken but a cat - and curiosity got my cat!

Okies, so I image backup my alternate HD and then completely wipe it (all zeros).

Next, boot DOS CD, and I create a primary FAT32 partition, about 6GB in size. This will become my PQS partition. Now, I plug in my external USB HD with a ghost image of the PQS partition and I now restore it into my newly created FAT32 partition. Reboot onto DOS CD.

Now I have a single partition (currently type 0B) which contains the PQS image. Using and MBR editor, I carefully replace my MBR with the Acer-specific one (copied from my factory HD). By carefully, I only replaced the code portion of the MBR, but I left the partition table unchanged. I also then changed the PQS partition to type 12.

Now I have (hopefully) a HD that contains the Acer-specific MBR code, a single PQS partition marked as type 12, and no other partitions.

I reboot, and press Alt-F10 to invoke the magic PQS partition. It boots and starts into the Acer recovery software. At the point it starts to run the Acer flavor of Ghost, ghost generates an error/warning that it can't find "the partition" and it wants to overwrite the PQS partition. Ah-ha! The Acer ghost is trying to restore to partition 2 and can't find it.

So, I reboot back to CD DOS, and now I create partition 2 - another primary FAT32 partition, about 16GB in size. Just for kicks, I made it Win98 DOS bootable (this way I can test the normal boot of the laptop). And sure enough, I reboot and it happily boots up my partition 2 "C:" drive to a Win98 command prompt. At this point, the PQS partition is still marked 12h (hidden) but also I noticed that the partition type for partition 3 is now 10h. This is left over from my first boot of the PQS partition which always tries to hide partition 3 (no matter what type it is) - it just seems to logically OR partition 3's type with 10h (so 00 OR 10 = 10). If I had the factory ACERDATA partition there, it would have ORd 10 with 0F to create a hidden 1F type.

Ok, reboot and Alt-F10 again. This time, we enter the Acer recovery software, and when ghost starts, no errors and it is "recovering" my factory WinXP to partition 2 just fine. When it completes the restore, it auto-reboots the laptop. At this point I didn't allow it to boot the HD - I forced a reboot to my DOS CD to see "what's going down" on the disk.

What I noticed is that the PQS partition is still there (type 12), I now have the Acer factory WinXP in partition 2, partition 3 is still type 10 (I'll ignore that for now), but more interestingly, is that there's a small change in the Acer MBR code. A value that was 33h is now 5Ah. Long story short: this value change is used as a flag by the MBR boot code to force another reboot to the PQS partition and NOT boot WinXP in partition 2. I noticed that the WinXP partition is not fully restored in that it is missing much of the Acer-specific bloatware.

Okies, I let the laptop boot normally. And yes, it reboots back to the PQS partition (even though partition 2 was marked bootable). I did not press Alt-F10 this time, so that 5Ah flag is forcing the MBR to boot the PQS partition again. This time, the PQS partition does a PHASE TWO operation and "copies files". It has detected that the WinXP partition was restored but is missing the Acer stuff. It effectively copies over the C:\ACERNB folder and makes a few tiny changes to some startup files.

Once this completes, another snoop reveals that the MBR is now back to the 33h value and that it looks like it's ready to boot "factory" style. So I let it boot up, and voila - I'm getting WinXP first-time user experience. Once WinXP gets to the desktop, all the Acer software (17 items) gets installed (this is what PHASE TWO of PQS did). Once the Acer software is fully installed, it deletes the secret ACERNB folder. I also noticed that partition 3 (which was type 10h) is now back to 00h (so that was also "fixed").

What I noticed this time (before I didn't copy over the Acer-specific MBR code) is that I now have eRecovery installed and running. When I did this before with the default MBR code, I guess the Acer install felt that I didn't have an PQS partition (because it looks at a signature in the MBR) so it didn't install eRecovery.

After all of this, I just imaged restored my HD back to what I had before.

So, what I have determined for the Travelmate 810x flavor of PQS (D2D) is:
- It won't work if the only partition is a PQS partition in partition 1
- It won't work unless partition 2 is a primary FAT32 partition
- It hides partition 3 by ORing the type with 10h, but doesn't seem to matter
- It seems that it absolutely doesn't matter what partition 3 is at all
- It works better if the MBR code is the Acer-specific code (Alt-F10 works)
- It fully restores eRecovery when the MBR code is the Acer code

So, I'd recommend that if anyone wants to "fully backup" their system so they can either fully restore it or fully restore it on another HD, they should do a complete image backup of the factory HD before messing with partitions and such. Also, it wouldn't hurt to make a manual backup of the Acer MBR code and perhaps the PQS partition too as a separate ghost partition image.

Bit.

Hey.... BitBasher is correct. Somehow, i did exactly the same things and finally managed to force the Laptop (Aspire 5652WLMi) to boot with PQS partition. It's truth that nothing will happen if there is no 2nd partition marked as FAT32X (extended). The restoration took about 5 minutes but the second time the PQS Service wanted to boot, i didn't let it to do so (didn't know the reason and for that i supposed that it was my fault because i had changed the partitions types). So i had a disk with PQS partition intact, and a pre-installed partition of WinXP Home on FAT32X. For some reason, the second partition didnot boot so i used DOS FDISK and i found out that NO partition was marked "Active" in order to let the system boot. I did marked the second partition active and finally...i couldn't boot again...!!!! The problem was that there was an error when booting:
"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
Windows root \system32\hal.dll
Please re-install a copy of the above file."

I used a bootdisk image from www.bootdisk.com (the link:
http://1gighost.net/fishnet/xpquick.exe ) and changed the boot.ini value from partition 0 to partition 1 (the partition 0 is the PSQ partition, so the WinXP is the 1) and tried to boot again (thank God i had a USB Floppy).

YESSSss...... That's it...!!! Everything was running, no i had to find out about the "hal.dll" error. Simple, make boot.ini of your WindowsXP installation NOT read-only and edit it. You will see that the partition to boot in the boot.ini is partition 3... (?) Change that to 2 (as we said before) and reboot.

Everythink works fine...!!! Now you have a clean preinstalled WinXP system..!!!

And something else... In the C:\Windows\System32\Autorun directory or
%SystemRoot%\System32\Autorun you will find...AN IMAGE of your Application and Utility CD that came with your laptop....!!! Mine didn't had one so that is VERY VERY handy as now i can install WindowsXP Professional and have every application that is supplamental, but CANN'T be found on any Acer's site, like Acer's Arcade (the reason that i went all this trouble)!!!

I hope i helped you more with this thread that noone will go through all this trouble i did for about 10 days...!!!

BIT

This where I have a problem. How did you achieve an archive of the ACER MBR, and what did you use to insert it. This has got me worried (thinking) !. I use GHOST 9 recovery disk and todate I have not used the MBR restore action. The only serious crash effecting the drive structure I have had, was an incident when a spurious partition appeared infront of the PQSERVICE partition. Using a Dos version of PQMagic I deleted it and all was well.

Dave

I have not used ghost 9, so I have no clue if it can fully restore the Acer-specific MBR. If it supports this option (and assuming it actually works), that would be very handy.

I personally use go olde DEBUG to backup/restore the MBR. I go waaay back to DOS programming days when DEBUG was *THE* hot debugger. :P

But, there are much newer tools that'll probably work well. Check out: http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/as..._in_detail.htm
Look in the Free Software section, there's something called MBRWizard. That will probably do the trick if you want to be SUPER safe and have the MBR backed up. For the SUPER anal, you might want to backup the entire first track (sectors 0 to 63) of your HD, as sometimes there can be "secret" information in sectors 1 to 63 (sector 0 is the MBR).

WARNING TECH ALERT DANGER WILL ROBINSON BELOW!!!
(Doing this and/or making mistakes can TRASH your data - this information is provided as (mis)information only. USE AT *YOUR* OWN RISK!)

If you have a bootable USB floppy drive (or even a standard floppy drive) and a copy of DOS DEBUG, you can backup your HD drive 0 MBR by doing this:

A:> debug
-a 100
int 13
int 3
<press Enter to exit ASM mode>
rax
201
rbx
200
rcx
1
rdx
80
g
rbx
0
rcx
200
nMYMBR.BIN
w 200
q

If you make no errors in any of that, then you should end up with a file on the floppy A: drive, "MYMBR.BIN" which should be exactly 512 bytes in size, and it should be a copy of your current MBR.

I don't recommend doing this unless you:
- Have fully backed up all your HD data
- Feel comfortable messing with DEBUG
- Are willing to take the risk of accidently wiping your HD data

Trust me, I've done it. If you don't get the DEBUG registers setup exactly correct, you CAN damage or lose your DATA on your HD - you are using INT 13 which is low-level disk access services - very dangerous.

Try the spiffy software on that link would be the best bet.
Bit.

BIT

Many thanks. It is also along time since I used debug. Your link to the software is appreciated. Nearly fifty years since my first computer experience (Valves to IC's). Very much a hobby these days. Yet never too old to learn. I like to be 'fireproof' WRT security and OS backup's.

There's a simple way. Once you've unhidden the PQservice drive locate mbrwrdos.exe:

Two files required and to backup on your boot disk are 'mbrwrdos.exe' and 'rtmbr.bin'

Regards,

Peter

i don't speak english so it's in spanish it works for me check:

haz una copia de seguridad con norton ghost de la particion PQSERVICE, y guardala en otro disco o particion para despues abrirla en windows con el northon ghost instalado, despues extrae la carpeta PATCH, de la misma particion, e instala la aplicacion erm, despues reinicia la computadora y te pedira incertar un cd o dvd para crear copia de la particion, mete un dvd o cd y deja que se haga la copia de la particion, reinicia, la computadora, inicia desde el dvd o cd creado y listo, funciono para mi. espero para alguien mas de aqui tambien

To get what's inside the PQSERVICE-partition all you need to do is back it up with Norton Ghost, then use Ghost Explorer to browse and extract any file you need.

acer aspire 9300

hi ive got an acer aspire 9300 and i installed windows xp on top of vista thinking i would get a dual boot, but didnt work, now i cannot do an alt f10 function to recovery my system, can you please help me as you seem to no what you are doing. i didnt backup the recovery onto disk,. also the pqservice partition is still intact.

PQmagic & PQService

FYI:

I just used PQmagic 8.x on an Acer Aspire One & all worked fine.

Initially, there was a PQService partition of about 6Mb and one other C-drive partition.

Using PQmagic, i've repartitioned it to partitions in order of:

PQService (6Mb):C-drive (30Mb)-drive (82Mb)

All seems to be running fine....

you need partition magic or similar (partition magic is the one I've borrowed for this purpose myself); the program will give you full access to your file system at the deepest level, I used it to retrieve the pqservice partition after finding out the hard way that I should have used D2D recovery instead of installing windows from a cd. not sure on the retail price for this application, but it's a system saver! Err, oops! should'vbe read thru the replies first. I'm no help here. apologies for the waste of space.