Has anyone done this with Synantec Ghost 10 pre-installed?
There's over 200MB of files besides the image on my restore partition and I'd like to delete them and resize the partition and just have the essential files that will enable the restore to work. Can someone tell me what are the essential files along with the image that are needed on the restore partition?
As it is, when I hit Ctrl+F11 I boot into a Symantec Ghost 10.0 environment which has several options. I would rather it booted directly into Ghost 8.3 and just did the restore - does anyone know what I need to do to achieve this?

Got a little farther with my Fujitsu notebook, changed the text in the blue bar into custom text and changed the eula into custom eula!





Ofcourse the text in the Eula is dutch because i am.......

I like!

I don't know what files they are and how many but maybe if you Google them you can distinguish if they belong to Ghost or not.That's the first thing i would do :-).
But if i read this page ( http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/ghost10.htm ) at Goodell's site it might be WinPE files that are on that partition because Ghost 10 is 32 bit and not 16 bit anymore.
If you still want to try, the next thing i would do is, make the image visible with Ptedit, than simply make an image of the restore partition, delete the extra files one at the time, rehide it, and after each delete see if the restore partition is still accesible/usable.To be really sure you could do a real restore after each delete but that maybe very time consuming and you would first have to backup all your own stuff from the XP partition (or also make an image?)
But i guess if its the WinPE files than it won't work anymore :-(
As for just restoring without user interference, maybe with a bat or ini file, don't know.Maybe something like that is in the Ghost 10 manual if you can get a hold of that.Or maybe just email Symantec and ask that question, if you're lucky you will get a reply.

Thanks for the reply gombal, but all I really need is a list of the files on a normal restore partition - one that doesn't have ghost 10 installed.
I'll try the delete one file at a time method and see how far I get.
How did you change the www.dell.com blue bar and EULA screens?

For changing the Eula and the www.dell.com blue bar all the credit goes to Goodell's site, got all the information from there.Although he doesn't actually describe how to change the Eula or the blue bar, he does describe where to find the Eula.As for the blue bar, if you have to change anything with DE.exe, you stumble across the place where www.dell.com is located, so i just gave it a try.Pc wouldn't boot when i tried to replace the www.dell.com line with more than 12 symbols, www.Fujitsu.com Changed it to .Fujitsu.com, also 12 symbols, changed the 3 w's to the symbols also seen on one of the screenshots at Goodell's site and my pc booted like before.Only now showing .Fujitsu.com, not the prettiest solution but if i feel like it i'll try some more.
The Eula screen was very simple, if you make the DellUtility partition visible with PTedit, look in the Dell directory, there is a bmp file there.It's 256 colors, 640x480 pixels.I just replaced that bmp file with a file of my own, same name ofcourse, 256 colors and 640x480 in size and, voila!Then rehide it again with PTedit.

P.S.Look in your private messages.....

Thanks gombal, I'll have to give goodells a good read.
I had tried the bitmap edit before but I always just got a blank screen. I'll have to have another look at it.

Hey All,
This is my first post. I`ve managed to repair the HD partitions on my Dell Inspiron 6400. However try as I might I cannot get the DellRestore partition to boot, looking at it it seems damaged, not all the files are there.
Has anyone made a Ghost image of the DellRestore Partition and if so could you somehow let me have a copy?.
Thanks to all at this forum for their help.

I've got an image of my restore partition minus my OS image, but it's the Symantec 10 one - 270MB.
I've tried using the smaller default Dell image (both utility and recovery) that gombal gave me but it didn't work - possibly due to the version of Ghost I'm using for creating my OS image - the Dell Ghost/SVCTAG boot CD. I got as far as the Dell recovery environment but gave me some message then - probably due to an incompatibility with the OS image I'd put on the recovery partition.
Now that i think of it, I do still have the images that gombal gave me so PM me if you want them.

First a great big thankyou for sending me the images, they worked OK.

I manged to install a new image plus I also got Mediadirect to work aswell.

This is how I did mine,

You will need the following boot disks,

Norton Ghost 2003
Dsrfix
PartitionMagic
Mediadirect3
OS of choice or Ghost Image

Step 1.
Insert the Mediadirect3 cd and partition the HD, I used option 2 and made 4 partitions.

pbr1 Dellutility
pbr2 NTFS
pbr3 Extended(Includes Mediadirect type DD)

Install your OS or Ghost Image.
Install MediaDirect3 on to your OS.

Step 2.
Insert the PartitionMagic CD, resize the Mediadirect partition to allow for a fourth partition for Dellrestore.
Make the Dellrestore Partition as Fat32 and format it. (size depends on your Ghost Image file)
Optional, format the extra partition

Step 3.
Insert the Dsrfix CD and run Ptedit,
you should see....

DE DellUtility fat16
07 Windows ntfs
0F Extended (includes Mediadirect type DD)
0C Dellrestore fat32

run dsrfix /pbr4, if everything is OK run dsrfix /pbr4 /f
and type y for everything.

Step 4.
Insert the Ghost 2003 CD and restore the DellUtility Image to pbr1 and Dellrestore Image to pbr4. (I used the extra partition to store the Images)

Reboot and check everything works OK.

*note I also managed to dualboot xp/vista with this setup

i was wanting to do this to my inspiron 6000 and was wondering if someone could send me the images. i dont have the "DIAG" or the "RESTORE" partitions as i am the 2nd owner but i am guilty of deleting these on other peoples pc's before i knew what they were. lol

hello all..
my friend has a xps1210 dell laptop.
while installing vista for him i partitioned his existing 100gigs hard drive into 2 50gig harddrive.
I also inknowingly deleted a 4th partioin tht showed up as unallocated space in the storge console(disk management).
Now i have lost that dell restore functionality as well as media direct.
Any hopes of restoring it?
any help would be highly appreciated.
Thanks

If it was the dell restore partition then It should have shown up as "unknown partition". I found that after Installing Vista the dellrestore and mediadirect no longer worked. Apparently you have to obtain a fix from the dell site to restore that functinality

hello thanks for the speedy reply..
although there seems to be a fix for the mediadirect for xp...(i reinstalled xp cause he had some driver problems with his router),no current fix for the restore is there.
Okay i need to ask you guys somethingi had partitioned his hdd to 2 50 gigs parts.
okay heres my question:

there is a single eisa partion of about 120megs(i assume this to be the dell restore partition)
2 partions of 50gigs tht i created
one unknown volume tht i made the mistake of formatting to ntfs.
another unknown volume tht i didnt touch.

Will i be able to use tht dsrfix and fix the restore thing if i format the drive to fat32?(the unknown volume of course).

Thnaks in advance

I would use pbrfix to find out what the partition codes are.
The utility/diag partition should be DE (fat16) and about 47mb.
A dellrestore partion should be DB (fat32x).
The mediadirect partiton is part of an extended partition (0F) and has a code of DD about 2gb in size.

Formating to fat32 may allow dsrfix to write a new MBR but you have to have the partitions in the correct order for that to work.