Hello: I did a short search on the board as well as a Google search for the topic which I wish to briefly find an answer to and so far I have not been as successful in finding what it is that I am hoping to get. For your convenience the specs for my computer are in the the following: windows 7 home premium with 4 gb ram on a 64 bit OS (Acer aspire). The processer is intel core On my HDD there are 3 Primary drives. One of them being the PQservice drive, the second one being NTFS system reserved and the third being windows 7. As many of you are aware we can only have 3 primary drives on any one HDD. I wish to install another version of windows on the HDD; however, I cannot because of the limitation restriction of only having 3 primary drives. I was wondering how I would be able to do this as the pqservice drive is important to have. Some questions that I would like to pose are listed below: 1. Can the pqservice drive (currently at 15 GB) be converted to a logical drive and still be safely used and functional after subsequent boots of the laptop after it has been converted to a logical drive. Or does it need to remain as a primary drive all the time? 2. If it is possible to convert the pqservice drive to a logical drive ( data will be lost no doubt during the formatting and conversion) after I have booted into windows 7, then copied the contents through using either easus or acronis as examples (or maybe just simple copy/paste?) and still remain booted while in windows. Then after formatting the pqservice drive to logical, recover the pqservice files and folders (from acronis or easus) onto the newly formatted logical drive and then reboot back into windows 7 all the while having the pqservice drive remain usable to the operating system thence? 3. If not possible in converting the pqservice drive to logical (so as to be able to get the previous primary drive now usable for the second windows operating system that I would like to install) because perhaps the pqservice drive needs to remain as a primary partition, then how would it be possible to do so? thanks very much for your assistance.
Windows allows a maximum of 4 partitions on each physical HDD. 4 Primary partitions, or 3 primary and one extended partition.
Pqservice will most likely fail to work if you make any changes to it. The important thing is that pqservice just contains a factory image of your system drive along with a recovery console, you can revert to factory state by simply creating an image of the C: drive with ghost or macrium reflect or acronis or whatever or creating a set of recovery disks. If you do that you have no use of pqservice. In any case after some time once you've updated drivers and grown tired of oem bloatware/installed new apps, pqservice will become obsolete. Alternatively, you can dump sysres. Remember sysres holds the files needed to boot windows (its the active partition, check thats so on your machine), it also contains Acer's custom mbr that lets you use a key combo (like alt+f10) to boot into pqservice. Deleting sysres will make windows unbootable (unless you make C: bootable and active first), it'll also wipe the custom mbr and the ability to use the key combo. FYI, sysres also enables bitlocker so if you need that feature, let sysres stay. Alternatively, you can dump the whole jingbang- first download the win7+sp1 iso from the MDL repo, backup acer drivers and license keys (if any), backup data, then partition the hard drive the way you want beforehand (dont leave it to windows), install windows and activate offline. Then install all drivers and apps.
Yes. Your quite right and I overlooked this in mentioning it. This is in fact my current partition layout. I think I might just take your third alternative option to dump the whole thing. However, before I ever do venture in doing that, I just want to be clear on what your saying in regards to making an image of the C: drive only. If going that route, quite honestly, I really will no longer require the pqservice drive because of the fact it having only a factory image of the computer when I bought it. If I do that, I pretty much have no use for the pqservice and I might as well eliminate it altogether after imaging the C: drive. Is this correct as I understand what you are saying? Now if I do keep both the C: drive (make this active partition instead) and the sysres drive, Windows should still boot even though the partitions to have Windows boot via one drive rather than the other have now changed. Is this also what your saying? If this is correct, then all I really need to do is to now search for a way to do this. I do believe that entering the BIOS would be the method in doing this.