[nflug] wtf is up with this %$#@*& "dell restore" partition

Cyber Source peter at thecybersource.com
Tue Dec 19 16:36:26 EST 2006


Stephen Burke wrote:
> All the recent talk here about ntfsresize as a helpful tool to make
> new laptops actually useful some of the time inspired me to attack an
> inspiron b120 which been an M$+dell nightmare for the last half year
> or so. I have the latest knoppix for parted (as suggested somewhere I
> was reading about ntfsresize), and the thing's got a 40G drive, so
> there's plenty of space. But when I open parted, instead of the big
> ntfs partition I expected, there are 2 MORE parts in there - a small
> (6M or so) fat16 at the start and a 3G fat32 at the end called "dell
> restore".
> At first I thought I could just burn the 3G one to a dvd and then kill
> it, but there's only a dvd reader in there, so I thought to share it
> to a machine that HAS a dvd burner, but I can't find it anywhere in XP
> except in the disk manager there, and I can't share from there. ;-)
>
> Any ideas on what this thing is, eating up a healthy chunk of my hard
> drive? Whether I need it? WTF is on it? Clearly dell has taken pains
> to hide it. Do I juat let dell jack me for 3 gigs, or do I wipe it off
> there because it's some sort of timebomb set to go off when gates and
> dell finally take off the gloves and start battling for Master of the
> Universe?
>
> Having that extra 3 gigs would be nice, but I expect about twelve dell
> lawyers to start calling me an sending me nasty letters as soon as the
> M$ servers find out that they can't scan my shit the way they used to.
>
> Thanks,
> S.
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That's probably a restore partition for use with their restore cd's, you
should leave that alone. Just resize the m$ ntfs partition and ignore
the rest. Don't forget, after resizing, you will need to DELETE the
actual ntfs partition and create a new one STARTING with the same
cylinder it originally started on and at least the size that your just
resized it too. Also make sure to set the id to 7 for ntfs and set the
"a" flag to designate the boot flag on the partition, IF it existed
before. Failure to do the right things will leave it borked! But if you
do it right you can resize it successfully in a few minutes.
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