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Need some urgent advice for clean install of WinXP Pro

post #1 of 5
7/18/04 at 10:51am
Thread Starter 
w00t
My Dell I8600C lappy finally arrived on Friday 11 AM (Melbourne Australia time).



I have been having too much fun with it. I will post some reviews and benchmarks once I finish all my software installations.

Now I am about to do a clean install of WinXP Pro + all my precious productivity programs!

When I opened up PartitionMagic 8.0 ... I found that:
47.0 Mb of the HDD was assigned to a PRIMARY partition named DELLUTILITY ... is this the space taken up by the dell diagnostics utility that you have the option of booting into when you press F12 during POST???
In which case, I better leave this partition as is, right?
The funny thing is it does not show up in M$ Windows Explorer and does not have a drive letter assigned to it ... althought it is of type FAT!

Then there are two more primary partitions:
[o] 57,176.7 Mb NTFS [C: Drive]
[o] 7.8 Mb Unallocated[*]

So my last question is, can I allocate the 7.8 Mb unallocated space to a partition or should I leave it as is?

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post #2 of 5
7/18/04 at 11:00am
u can allocate the 7.8mb, but i wouldnt mess around with partition magic for that little space. PM has a nasty habbit of deleting on too many partitions
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post #3 of 5
7/18/04 at 11:03am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Evo
u can allocate the 7.8mb, but i wouldnt mess around with partition magic for that little space. PM has a nasty habbit of deleting on too many partitions
Hi Evo

Thanks for your reply.

To be honest, I don't care much about the 7.8 Mb when I have 60 Gb ... I just want to keep my system consistent. My thinking is why waste space when that space (if it does not serve any special purpose) could be used.

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post #4 of 5
7/18/04 at 11:46am

Dell Diagnostic Partition

You really don't need the diagnostic partition becuase you have the same utility on a cd that came with your system. Even if you delete both partitions while in Win XP setup it sill leaves around 8MB of space unpartitioned (no idea why) so If you want to delete the diagnostic partition go ahead, and I would leave partitions alone with partition magic. If you are using it for a slave drive with no os on it, it works great but on the primary drive it has screwed things up royally for me before.
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post #5 of 5
7/18/04 at 11:53am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by ComputerGeek737
You really don't need the diagnostic partition becuase you have the same utility on a cd that came with your system. Even if you delete both partitions while in Win XP setup it sill leaves around 8MB of space unpartitioned (no idea why) so If you want to delete the diagnostic partition go ahead, and I would leave partitions alone with partition magic. If you are using it for a slave drive with no os on it, it works great but on the primary drive it has screwed things up royally for me before.
Arghhh! Too late! I allocated the 7.8 Mb Unallocated[*] space while I was setting up two other logical partitions. Now I am in the middle of a WinXP Pro install ... I hope it doesn't screw up on me later on!

Well, I kept the Dell Diagnostics Utility in my HDD, since I don't think I will be carrying any Dell driver CDs around with me. Hehe ... I can also show off to my friends that Dell has this cool diagnostics feature ... will also fool them into thinking it's on the BIOS since there is not much HDD activity when that partition is accessed!

Thanks a lot for answering my questions.
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