Partition drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Colt Free
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Colt Free

I have a dell computer and it came with my hard drive partitioned, I
would like to remove this but have no idea how to, could someone please
help me with this??

regards

Colt
 
It was supplied that way because it has a recovery partition which, if
deleted, will render your recovery CD set useless.. leave it as it is..
 
You may also have a large partition for using with Ghost which, unlike the
hidden Recovery Partition Mike mentions,can be deleted if you don't want to
use Ghost. I've deleted it on my Dell pc but forget how I did it however
someone from alt.sys.pc-clone.dell will know how to do it.
 
Colt said:
I have a dell computer and it came with my hard drive partitioned, I
would like to remove this but have no idea how to, could someone
please help me with this??
Click to expand...


First, a word on the terminology. *All* hard drives (at least all that are
in use) are partitioned.. To partition a drive is to create one or more
partitions on it. You can't use a drive unless it has at least one partition
(normally C:) on it.

So your drive came with two or more partitions. You presumably don't simply
want to remove the partitions other than C:, but to combine them with C:, so
that you end up with a single C: partition the full size of the drive.

Unfortunately, no version of Windows provides any way of changing the
existing partition structure of the drive nondestructively. The only way to
do what you want is with third-party software. Partition Magic is the
best-known such program, but there are freeware/shareware alternatives. One
such program is BootIt Next Generation. It's shareware, but comes with a
free 30-day trial, so you should be able to do what you want within that 30
days. I haven't used it myself (because I've never needed to use *any* such
program), but it comes highly recommended by several other MVPs here.

Whatever software you use, make sure you have a good backup before
beginning. Although there's no reason to expect a problem, things *can* go
wrong.
 
Colt said:
I have a dell computer and it came with my hard drive partitioned, I
would like to remove this but have no idea how to, could someone please
help me with this??

regards

Colt
Click to expand...

Dell systems ship with either two or three partitions on them: Windows
partition, Dell Utility partition (onboard diagnostics program), Dell
Image Restore (aka PC Restore) partition. I don't know the exact order
in which they are put on the drive (I never actually looked) but I
believe it is Utility/Windows/Image-Restore.

I would recommend leaving the utility partition alone, as it allows you
to run hardware diagnostics without having to boot from the Dell
Resource CD (assuming your hard drive isn't the reason you want to run
diagnostics).

The Image Restore partition is basically a Norton Ghost image of the
system as it was when the factory set it up. Pressing CTRL+F11 at boot
to reload the factory image can save you quite a bit of time if you
don't need to save any of the data on the hard drive, but you need to
reinstall. If you do not want to use the factory install then removing
this partition will not cause any problems at all.


Larry
Dell Customer Advocate
 
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