M4600: What is OEM Partition for?

I had to re-image my M4600 due to BSOD. I attempted to use the Dell Backup and Restore application to restore it to the factory image, but it would not work, so I am doing the installation using the Windows 7 disk. I blew away the restore partition, but I noticed there is also an OEM partition. What is it for? Is it required for the diagnostics? I'd like to keep the diagnostics, but if the partition is not required, there's no point to keep it.

 

I always end up deleting it, I wanna say it has some of the drivers when you do a reinstall, don't quote me on it. The times I've restored a couple laptops, you gain access to it from doing recovery, I believe

 

The drive originally had an OEM partition and a recovery partition. I initially deleted the recovery partition because I was not able to recover the factory image that was stored in it. There were no adverse affects (bios diagnotics still worked okay). Since I cloned the drive before I reinstalled the OS, I decided to also try deleting the OEM partition. Again, so far there were adverse affects. The bios diagnostics still work fine. So I can say at this point there are no obvious reasons to keep the oem or recovery partitions if you don't intend to use the DBRM software to recover the factory image. I'm also glad to say that the BSODs have stopped.