Can't override damn Acer 5930g OEM partition!!

Tariq

New Member
Hi all, hope someone can help!

I just bought an Acer 5930g laptop which hates being partitioned!

The original partition scheme was:

1) 9Gb FAT32 recovery, type 27;
2) 112Gb NTFS primary, type 07;
3) 112Gb NTFS primary, type 07;
4) 4Gb (limited XP) Multimedia Arcade, type 12.

I shrank partn 2 with a view to putting XP Pro on the unallocated space. As there were too many partitions now, and since I needed some logical drives, I deleted the unwanted partition 4 to make 2 logical drives within an extended type.

Problem is: this will not stick, it disappears and reverts to a default EISA (OEM) type 12 partn after reboot... It doesn't matter whether I use Vista's Disk Management, Diskpart, GParted Live CD, some other partition tool or even whether I edit the partition table itself (with say PTEdit32) using Admin privileges! The Acer setup - or is it Vista - somehow restores the partition scenario prior to the changes I make! Amazing!

Is it from within the Acer-customised-BIOS, is it coming from one the OEM partitions, is it Vista itself, is it Acer restore-ware within Vista? What is it?? :wtf:

And what are those 2 tiny partitions that are only picked up by GParted? A 1Mb partn right at the beginning and a 5Mb partn between the (shrunk) Vista partn and the newly-created XP partn?

Further, I seem to remember that after simply enabling or disabling boot-time recovery in the BIOS (Alt+F10 option) or after entering the recovery out of curiosity (exiting without actually doing it) this had some effect on the partition scheme too, though my frazzled brain can't recall exactly how... :??

Actually, I can't get into recovery now, after forcing a power-off while the PC was constantly looping-booting into the Acer recovery partition! I got out of that only with the Vista repair CD I made from the ISO off this website!

So what is going on here? Any ideas? Have Acer mastered self-regenerating partitions that are genetically-encoded into the machine? :x

Or am I missing something obvious?

How do I get those logical drives? I'd like to try out Ubuntu at some point, apart from the need for data storage areas! (Man, this Acer keyboard sucks!)

HEEEEEELP!! :S

Addendum:

I should add, to fill in a gap above, that after deleting the partn 4, I incorporated it into partn 3. Oops!
 
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If you're trying to delete a OEM partition you do not need, you can do this using diskpart from a Vista DVD. It'll complain and warn you still, but it should allow you to delete it.
 
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