Pqservice flashing on and off on startup

I was booting into Ubuntu from a usb stick so I could use Gparted to fix another usb stick that was faulty. I made sure the C: drive was not mounted while I was doing this. So while it was performing an action and scanning the all the drives, Gparted crashed. I freaked a little bit.

Everything on the C: drive seems okay, except now the PQSERVICE partition is assigned a drive letter and flashes on and off in My Computer while XP is starting up, then it disappears. I'm concerned because I don't want that to be messed up in case I need to restore the laptop.

In Gparted it is now flagged as "diag", and not "hidden", but maybe that is how it should be. I never looked at it that closely. This may be a question for the Gparted forum, but they may not know as much about Acer netbooks. Maybe the Pqservice partition has always done this on XP startup and I just never noticed it before. I just want to be sure it will still work if and when I try to reset the netbook.

 

I do not see the PQSERVICE part. flash on WinXP start up. I wouldn't depend entirely on the recovery partition alone, create recovery discs and verify that they work. You could also make an image of your install from Linux with the "dd" command and save it to a portable hard drive for use at a later date if the orig. hdd dies or you install a larger one.

 

Thank you for the tip. I did as you suggested and read up on the dd command. I figured if I created an iso of pqservice and put it on a thumbdrive then it would be possible to boot it up with grub or something. So here is the command that worked:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/sda2/pqservice.iso bs=2048 conv=sync,notrunc

Whats weird is that ended up creating a 6.1 GB file and my pqservice only takes up 4.9 GB. I tried mounting it with virtual clone drive to see what it looked like and Windows couldn't read it. I thought that's just because it's too big, but Puppy Linux can't mount it either. Any clues about what's going on here? Thanks!

 

I do not have any experience with just creating a pqservice image but have used dd to create an image of the whole disk for back up to re-install. I would recommend using Acer's eRecovery to create system and application cd/dvd's if you haven't done so already.
The difference in the pqservice image size maybe due to the "bs=2048" value.

phil

 

I've given up on dd. I tried Macrium Reflect and it created an image of pqservice just fine, but I don't know what to do with it. I don't want a proprietary image format that needs a running Windows with the app that made it installed. Something I could run from a live OS installed to usb is what I need..

What if I just copied all the files form pqservice to a folder on a usb? Seems like you could run one of those executables and have the same thing as pressing Alt + F10. No need to boot the partition.