Originally Posted by BitBasher

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.