I work for a company that has hundreds of Dell latitude D600 laptops and Dell Optiplex desktops. For those of you that are like me in that when you get/got your new Dell, you wiped or will wipe the hard drive and then load from scratch, I have a some advise.
Dell ships the PC's with two partitions, one is a small FAT32 Diagnostic partition and the other is the actual primary OS partition. When you boot a dell, the BIOS will prompt for you to press F2 for the BIOS or F12 for other boot options. This is a BIOS driven option. If you choose F12, you will be prompted with several options of which one is Diagnostics. When you choose diagnostics, the BIOS will perform some simplified tests on the PC. It will then ask you if you would like to perform more diagnostics. When you say yes and if you have wiped the FAT32 partition, the BIOS will tell you it's missing and to load the Dell Diagnostic CD. If you leave that FAT32 partition in place, the BIOS will run the same diags that come with the Dell Diagnostics CD....no need to load/carry CD's around.
My plan...when my i9300 arrives...is to make a Ghost image of the hard drive prior to my booting into it. Then I will make DVD copies of that load. I will then allow the OS to come up and at that point, I will run WinDriverBackup to extract the drivers that Dell loaded. I will save those to a CD. I will then boot from my Windows XP Pro w/SP2 CD and I will wipe only the OS partition, leaving the FAT32 partition in tact. I will create a new partition for the new XP Pro load. This conthfiguration will allow me to keep my Diagnostic's with the PC. I don't know about you guys, but I will probably lose my CD's!
Some might ask why I would want to backup the drivers since I should have received them with the recovery CD's and that is a great question. My experience is that Dell will sometimes load drivers from the factory that are not yet available either online or on their recovery CD's and so I like to backup the drivers with the original load.
Dell ships the PC's with two partitions, one is a small FAT32 Diagnostic partition and the other is the actual primary OS partition. When you boot a dell, the BIOS will prompt for you to press F2 for the BIOS or F12 for other boot options. This is a BIOS driven option. If you choose F12, you will be prompted with several options of which one is Diagnostics. When you choose diagnostics, the BIOS will perform some simplified tests on the PC. It will then ask you if you would like to perform more diagnostics. When you say yes and if you have wiped the FAT32 partition, the BIOS will tell you it's missing and to load the Dell Diagnostic CD. If you leave that FAT32 partition in place, the BIOS will run the same diags that come with the Dell Diagnostics CD....no need to load/carry CD's around.
My plan...when my i9300 arrives...is to make a Ghost image of the hard drive prior to my booting into it. Then I will make DVD copies of that load. I will then allow the OS to come up and at that point, I will run WinDriverBackup to extract the drivers that Dell loaded. I will save those to a CD. I will then boot from my Windows XP Pro w/SP2 CD and I will wipe only the OS partition, leaving the FAT32 partition in tact. I will create a new partition for the new XP Pro load. This conthfiguration will allow me to keep my Diagnostic's with the PC. I don't know about you guys, but I will probably lose my CD's!
Some might ask why I would want to backup the drivers since I should have received them with the recovery CD's and that is a great question. My experience is that Dell will sometimes load drivers from the factory that are not yet available either online or on their recovery CD's and so I like to backup the drivers with the original load.
