"Factory" recovery after hard drive wipe (with system discs)

I have an AOA150, 160GB, XP Home netbook. I tested the e-Recovery after I got it and it worked as expected. I asked for my system restoration cd's within the first 90 days and got them at no charge. Feeling comfortable now that I could put the system back to its original state if I ever wanted to sell the device, I proceeded on a year long experiment with various OS, multiboot states, etc. I felt so comfortable that I wiped the entire hard drive several times over that year, obviously destroying the PQSERVICE partition. In the midst of my latest adventure (trying to triple boot ubuntu\win 7\osx) I decided to break out the restoration discs that Acer provided. So starting out with a blank unformatted hard drive I booted up the SYSTEM disc per the Acer instructions. Disc spins up, then spins down and I am staring at a blank screen with a flashing cursor top left. Every combination of partition\format scheme that I have tried so far ends up the same way, EXCEPT - If I install Win 7, which creates a 100 MB system partition as well as the remainder of the disc as NTFS for the Win 7 install. If I boot the SYSTEM disc after that it actually starts up and quickly asks for the RECOVERY disc. When I run the RECOVERY disc it will eventually try to install all the PQSERVICE stuff to the 100mb system partition which obviously is not big enough so the recovery fails. Win 7 won't let me extend the system partition for some reason, and it seems like there should just be a cleaner method of doing this. I cannot think of anytime someone would use these restoration discs other than after a disc failure or replacement, and expected that they would take care of any partitioning or formatting that was required. That does not appear to be the case, and acer support is not being supportive...

How do I get the hard drive into a state that the provided SYSTEM\RECOVERY discs will boot and put my system back to the factory state?

 

Acer support coughed up a disk formatter utility:
http://support.acer.com/acerpanam/desktop/0000/Acer/VeritonL410/VeritonL410faq6.shtml

After booting with an Ubuntu live CD, I used gparted to wipe the disk and create a single ntfs partition. I re-booted to the disk formatter cd that I burned from the iso in the above link, which supposedly formatted the drive again. That utility finishes fairly quickly and asks for the system disk to be installed before a restart. Everytime I have started this process with the disk formatting utility, the system disk DOES boot and the recovery process runs successfully to completion (Disk Formatting CD --> SYSTEM disc --> RECOVERY disc --> SYSTEM disc --> reboots to XP Home). What I haven't figured out yet is how to get that PQSERVICE partition set up and the D2D back in service. I have some things I'll try over the holiday and I'll update this post.