OK, so I recently put vista business on my laptop, and everything was going fine until I decided to put xp pro 64-bit on my laptop because I get it for free from my college. I looked and saw that I have an Intel Celeron M 520 processor (which can run 64-bit), and the normal processor that comes with this laptop is a 420, which cannot run 64-bit. So I go through the installation, and I am at the screen to delete information on the drives of my computer, and I see a drive that I think was named PQSERVICE. I normally could not see the drive on my laptop running windows vista, and I figured with this extra 8gb of space, I might as well add it to my main partition.
When I installed xp pro 64-bit, everything seemed fine until I couldnt get onto the internet. I tried to download the driver for my ethernet controller, because this is marked as a problem in device manager in my laptop. I tried it, but it did not work because the driver was made for a 32-bit operating system, and the general aspire 3680 does not support 64-bit processing. I think that this problem would be solved if I could just get the right driver.
However, I have reinstalled vista business, and everything works fine except that when I put my office cd in and try running the setup, it prepares files and then finds taht I am missing the required files. All the drivers have been installed and everything is working fine according to device manager. When I tried putting a cd into my laptop with the xp pro installed (before) it also was missing required files, which I thought might just be some drivers.
I think that the information contained in that other partitioned drive that was only accessed through the bootup of my xp pro cd contained valuable information for this laptop to run. If anyone has any information on this topic, I would greatly appreciate it as everyone here has done in the past. Thanks for all the help :)

The PQSERVICE partition on Acer laptops holds a restore image of the hard drive as it was when you purchased it. Deleting it shouldn't cause any of the issues you are having.

This sounds like the CD read part of your combo drive is acting up. This could be driver errors or hardware. Go here http://www.cdspeed2000.com/download... and download Nero CD-DVD Speed. Run the Disk scan section with a CD in the drive and see if you get errors.

You can also download an Ubuntu live CD and try booting that, if it runs then the hardware is good.