9300 Disk Issues

Hi,
Interesting , comp mgmt, there are several extra volumes. I see a 55 mb fat partition, AND a 3.52 gb fat32 partition in addition to the standard os (xp home appx 71gb).

What are these other 2? One is supposedly a Dell diag partition, but unsure how you can access it. What is the fat32 for?

Also I ordered this system with only dvd/rom, I see no place to run this create utility cd (for dells predone system), nor do they provide an xp home cd to install the restore. I have a diff restore utility that I was able to run to copy off these images (in case), but I don't quite see what both are for, and how to use them?

Thanks

 

the two partitions are (1) diagnostics and (2) factory image

diag is accessed during POST, i believe f12 boot options

 

Thanks... So, how does factory image work though. It's a 3.52 gig partition versus the 71 gig (or so ) C drive that is there. Guessing this is a baseline of what's on the system. Since I don't have the utility on mine to "create" a factory cd (I checked) , is there any other way that I could use this fat32 partititon for recovery?

Thank you.

 

i removed all the partitions about 15 seconds after i got my notebook from dell. i didn't want to waste almost 4 gigs of space for the factory image. because of this, i don't have that option anymore and i don't know how to access/use it. maybe someone else who still has it can respond? i'm sure the dell site has instructions as well.

also, if you want an XP cd and/or driver CD, you can request them from dell and they will ship them to you.

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by drumfu

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by drumfu

 

Personally I guess I would rather get that stuff on a dvd but you can get that kind of space back via compression generally. I left it there 80 some odd gb is quite alot of space even in these space hungary days.

I9300 2.0ghz 1.0gb ram 100gb disk 256MB NVIDIA 6800 dvd rw UXGA Bluetooth Intel WiFi Media Center

 

Hi
THinking more about this. We have 3 prebuilt partitions, the fat16 (runs the diagnostics), the fat32 (which I assume is the restore partition), and the C drive with their os loaded on it .. Install xp pro and format the C drive, wipes out the Dell installed partition, reload drivers etc, and up and running. Leave the fat16 so when you do an f12 you can run Dell's diagnostics on the system very small footprint. The fat32 (dell restore), I'd imagine can go... Take a backup etc but really no need to keep it, and I also don't see any place in diags etc, where you can restore that fat32 image anyway????