I recently bought a new acer am5620, although I know my way around pc's I know nothing of hidden drives. Question is; there are three drives in disk management, first one is 9+ gigs (hidden) no info available, is this where acer has hidden the vista system recovery. The other two drives are 233 gigs, 1st is vista, 2nd has 96 mb of hidden file space. Reason being I want to install winxp on the second, but I know other systems have had their recovery data on the second drive? Without buying norton gost or anything else for more certainty, is it safe to assume the 9 gigs of data on 2nd drive "which is empty" is just system volume info? With no reinstall disk I wouldn't want to jack up my system!

You better call Acer & order the a set of factory recovery discs specific to your machine before messing with the partitioning on that PC. It shouldn't cost you anything.

....and yes that hidden partition holds the recovery image for your system.

First check for an Icon to trigger the make a recovery disk set. Run it and create a recovery disk (typically DVD, CD if the drive is a CDRW). All of the restore data is in the 9GB hidden partition. Do not touch this unless you have a restore disk. Another method would be to reduce the 233GB to something like 200GB with Partition Magic or another partition manager and use the remaining space to install XP.

Richard

Sorry I didn't get back.
I was able to find the program that makes the backup disks, every thing I've read on the net said you could not make the default acer disks.
Yesterday I found it after talking to the service people @ compusa, I had even went to the acer site and did a search for recovery with nothing pointing to the default restore disks, untill after I new to search for the recovery program by name.
You did bring up a good point, thanks, I forgot about Partition Magic, c & d drives are 233 gigs so I'm good with the partitions but I think I'll cut the second drive to have three drives and use Partition Magic for the dual boot I think I remember it having that program also, it's been a while. any ways thanks for the help guys.

I have a ASPIRE 4520 (Turion 64x2 processor, 1 GB RAM) ACER laptop with 160 GB harddisc. I have vista preinsalled. I wanted to Instal XP & the best way to go for it is to shrink ur present D drive using mycomputer>manage>storage>disc management
Using this u can easily repartition Ur hard disk to spare some space for XP. so far factory restore disc is concerned , u can easily create a disc(2 DVDs/ 9 CDs, which ever suits u better). Refer to acer manual. But i have a question,will xp be able to boot Vista, if we are installing XP after vista. Please answer this soon, as i am waiting with a disc in my hand.

OOps, I didn't get a e-mail notification of a post.
This worked on mine your pc may have a different restore program or version so if you don't have a hidden partion you risk your vista, unless you have the restore/backup disks.
I have a vista basic disk if you don't have one search the internet for alternitives (such as start up disks at microsoft.com)then you would have to edit stuff from a dos prompt) or after you install xp do a repair (not restore) from the f10 key at boot.
I decided not to go with partition magic $$
Instead I decreased my d drive and added another drive, installed xp on e: (which changed my vista boot loader to win xp's bootloader).
Then I started an installation of windows vista basic, that brang back the vista boot loader, but before the 3 seconds was up to boot to the new installation I switched to the pre-existing vista, in control panel/system/advaced/startupandrecovery I changed it to boot windows vista first and added 30 sec's to display operating system.
I downloaded VistaBootPRO_3.3.0 (free) from http://www.vistabootpro.org/ removed the vista basic new setup and deleted the setup (vista basic) files from the c: drive, I did have a little searching before I found the search tool to find my winxp installation, but did find and add it, removed the setup of vista basic from boot menu, now I have dual boot, also you can go to the hardware manufacturer site to get all the drivers and programs for hardware audio/video etc. There are many sites that explain how to do this, do your research before you attemp it or you may end up with only XP, like when they tell you you have to delete the vista installation (not), or as soon as you install vista, xp will be on the boot menu, this didn't happen, but VistaBootPRO made that possible.
Hope this helps, Darryl

oops
I downloaded VistaBootPRO_3.3.0 (free) from http://www.vistabootpro.org/ removed the vista basic new setup and deleted the setup (vista basic) files from the c: drive,
Should be:
Ran VistaBootPRO THEN
I did have a little searching before I found the search tool to find my winxp installation, but did find and add it, removed the setup of vista basic from boot menu, now I have dual boot, also you can go to the hardware manufacturer site to get all the drivers and programs for hardware audio/video etc. There are many sites that explain how to do this, do your research before you attemp it or you may end up with only XP, like when they tell you you have to delete the vista installation (not), or as soon as you install vista, xp will be on the boot menu, this didn't happen, but VistaBootPRO made that possible.
Hope this helps, Darryl