What are these partitions exactly?

Question

I bought an Acer laptop recently. I'm primarily running Ubuntu, with a windows partition for gaming. Anyway, there are a couple of partitions and I'm not sure what their purpose is. I'm assuming that one of them is the install media for Windows, but the other one has me stumped. One is 3.8 GB and the other is 15 GB. The label on the 15 GB one is PQSERVICE. They are both NTFS.

ls gives me this for the 15GB one:

50_CR.DAT     EFI              ProgramData    sources                    WINRE
AcerBoot.iso  ImageInfo.dat    Program Files  SystemCD.DAT
boot          Napp6.log        RCD.DAT        System Volume Information
BOOTMGR       NAPP6_TEMPLATES  Restore.dat    Users
D2D           NAPP.DAT         RyTools        Windows

and the contents of the 3.8 GB one are this:

AcerKit.exe     Dan.dll                 Intel         Program Files
AcerKit.ini     Deu.dll                 Ita.dll       Ptg.dll
Arcade.dat      Documents and Settings  Jpn.dll       Root_bg.bmp
boot.ini        Ell.dll                 MBR.ini       Rus.dll
Chs.dll         Enu.dll                 Nld.dll       Sve.dll
Cht.dll         Esp.dll                 Nor.dll       System Volume Information
CLLauncher.exe  Fin.dll                 NTDETECT.COM  Trk.dll
CLSetup         Fra.dll                 ntldr         WERUNTIME.INI
Csy.dll         Hun.dll                 Plk.dll       WINDOWS

They're both obviously put there by Acer, I'm just curious as to what the exact function of each of them is.

EDIT: After thinking about it myself, I think that PQSERVICE might be a factory default Vista installation and the smaller one is install media. Would this be correct?

Answer 1

They both look like they're used to restore and diagnose the computer. I would say the 15GB is your actual restore information, and your 3.8GB one is the application to launch it. Although 3.8GB seems a bit big for a PE installation. Is there any free space on the 3.8GB partition?

Answer 2

Quite a lot of laptops don't ship with an Windows installation CD and instead have this special partition that you can boot off to restore or reinstall windows.

Bear in mind, that if you ever want to resell or give away your laptop, you might need this.