I found and downloaded a demo copy of Acronis and used it to make a
clone of the source hard drive in question. Guess what? It worked!
When I checked though I found the same 31MB 'Dell Utility' partition
of 'unknown type' on the target drive. My conclusion? Dell is
playing games with me here. Maybe 'games' is not the right word.
Bye
God
I found this at
http://www.goodells.net/dellutility/
I don't know why it affects cloneing, but it does for sure.
Thanks for all your interests
God
Recent Dell computers come with a hidden Dell Utility partition at the
front of the disk. By pressing the right keys while the computer is
starting up, the bios startup procedure will pause and display a boot
menu from which the user can choose to boot this utility partition
instead of the normal Windows partition.
The Dell Utility partition exists in one of two states. It's
convenient to think of these two states like opening a factory-fresh
package in which the package is initially sealed, and then you break
the seal and open the package.
A new computer arrives from Dell in the 'sealed' state. When the
computer is booted from the hard disk for the very first time, the
user must acknowledge the Dell End-User License Agreement (EULA), is
prompted to record the Dell Service Tag for future reference, and then
the computer is allowed to boot into Windows. Once the seal is broken
(that is, the computer has booted at least once), this first-time
procedure is not repeated. After the computer has booted once in the
sealed state, it changes itself to the 'unsealed' state. The Dell
Utility partition becomes dormant and does not boot again unless the
user deliberately launches it from the bios boot menu. Otherwise, the
computer boots directly into Windows.
Partition Parameters
The Dell Utility partition is really an ordinary FAT16 partition, but
the partition-type indicator in the partition table has been changed
to 'DE'. For brevity, I'll henceforth refer to this as the DE
partition. This section describes in more detail the parameters of
this partition.
Sealed State
In its sealed state, the DE partition is marked as the 'active'
partition in the partition table. Thus, the first time the computer
boots from the hard disk it will boot the DE partition, not the
Windows partition. This section describes this one-time-only scenario.
Unsealed State
Once the DE partition has changed into its unsealed state, it is no
longer the active partition. The computer will boot directly into
Windows unless the user deliberately chooses to boot the DE partition
from the bios boot menu. In that case, the Dell Diagnostic program,
delldiag.exe, is automatically run from the DE partition. This section
describes this process in more detail.
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