Ubuntu Gutsy on Acer Laptop

Greetings all, for the last couple of weeks I've been unsure about what would be the right course of action to take.
I have an Acer Aspire 5920g, it came pre-installed with Vista, that takes up 4 primary partitions (PQSERVICE, ACER, DATA, and the strange XP/Arcade one). I've had many different suggestions about whether it's safe to remove one of the partitions, either completely, or replacing it on an extended partition, alongside Ubuntu 7.10 that I've been planning to install.
Does anyone have any suggestions about what I should do to get ubuntu on my laptop without removing any aspects of vista? I'm quite new to all this in general, so please try to keep it fairly simple.

 

Vista doesn't take all the partitions my friend. Acer has some of those from the factory. My advise (though I'm not a very reliable person when it comes to giving advices about Vista and Linux installed at the same time, but I can still give you an idea) is to remove every partition, install Vista and then install Ubuntu, but also use Vista's boot manager.

 

ah, sorry, slip of the... finger, yes, they're not all vista, apologies. The thing is, it came pre-installed, so I cannot re-install vista. I don't think a vista cd came with it, only a method of restoring it to it's factory settings. Which is what I have. Hence I'm looking into changing the partitions currently on there.

 

Didn't they give you a Vista DVD? You can get the Vista Anytime Upgrade DVD and do a clean install with your current key. There is a thread here made by olev and one made by Stalker (sorry if I have misspelled your names) regarding clean installs.

 

Hmmm, I would consider a clean install, but that would surely lose the Acer specific accessories that I'm trying not to affect?

 

I just bought a Acer 5520 and the first thing I did was to make the recovery disks, if somethig goes wrong. The I installed sabayon, and vista worked, then I installed ubuntu 32 and every things was ok, the I installed ubuntu 64 and vista stoped working, only ubuntu. This happened before with other laptops and I knew how fix it. To my surprise it did not work with acer with vista. For 2 days I could not install vista, I tried every thing possible with out success, so I returned the laptop for another one.

For what I had read, GRUB overwrote vista and acer bootloader. To fix it you need a copy of vista installation cd.

The recovery cds and the hidden partition is useless once the vista bootloader is overwritten.

 

interesting, I had issues with the 64-bit one initially, so switched to 32, but GRUB works fine on my Acer

 

Jimmy,

If you wrote GRUB to the master boot record(MBR) your vista and acer bootloader was overwritten and is posible that the ALT F10 recovery disk function is not working, you can check this if at boot time when the acer logo shows on the screen... if you press ALT F10 this triggers the recovery partition in your hard drive, if this happens i recomend making a backup of the MBR and save it in case somethig goes wrong, if it doesn't triggers the recovery mode then the original boot loader was overwritten.