Dell really voids warranty if OEM partitions are deleted?

I'm installing Win10 LTSC and wiping all partitions; EFI/MSR/Winretools/Image/DellSupport

I read on the official Dell website that Dell warranty will be voided if any of the partitions are deleted, replied by a support rep.

Is that really true?...or just a warning threat to prevent people from deleting Dell partitions and bloatwares?

I guess I could just say "System got corrupted and wiped the partitions, not me"?...

 

Or you could simply make a backup image of the drive and restore it if you need to send it in for service.

 

I will do that just in case, but the whole thing is like 20gb just wasting my external hard drive space...I want to delete it so bad. But voiding warranty for that is just absurd.

btw EFI is safe to delete if I'm clean installing a new OS right? only all other partitions are Dell related?

 

I recently went through converting to EFI on my server rebuild. There's very little info being stored there ~3MB or something and provisioned it at 50MB as that's the smallest it would go.

When fresh installing things I zap all of the partitions and then allocate 100GB for Windows to use and it creates 4 partitions on its own and then copies the files over.

Dell may be doing the warranty thing to curb returns for some reason. Seems a little absurd to me that this would actually be the case if you were to return the device for repair. It really wouldn't take much for them to just put the partition back onto the drive if they really wanted to. I made an image of my HDD from my car's MMI system before taking a stab at updating it to mSATA for quicker responses. The HDD is a 60GB drive and the compressed image / backup is about 1/2 that in size. It really should have been smaller but, I didn't get too aggressive with the compression since it's sitting on my server which is a Raid 10 w/ 16TB of storage space. But you could squeeze it on a USB drive and throw it in a drawer if you wanted to. I have a dunch of drives sitting around for little projects like this as you never know when you want to experiment with data. I picked up a USB-C Sandisk 32GB fot $9 on Amazon for imaging ISO's. I have a SanDisk Pro Extreme though that's 256GB for ~$55 but, that acts more like an internal SSD when trying to manipulate it into a boot drive but, it does ~400MB/s in speed which is enough to run Windows off of if I wanted to.

Just out of curiosity why are you wiping the drive and putting W10 on it?

I mean I wipe the drive when I get a new laptop anyway and reinstall Windows to get rid of any potential issues before they become one.

 

Yeah their policy absurd...the backup for XPS 13 7390 2-in-1 is about 20GB; very minimal on an 1TB external but...bothers me still. If I ever need to access the warranty, then I'm just gonna say the crash/BSOD wiped it all out.

I'm installing Linux/LTSC dual boot so partitions gotta go.

 

As a general rule now, I always replace the SSD that comes with a laptop (obviously not possible in Surface Pros etc). So in the event of a laptop having to be sent back or replaced, I don't have to worry about any security issues or having to install everything from scratch when the manufacturer inevitably wipes the drive.

It also allows me to add a faster drive into the laptop that has its own three to five year warranty.

 

Welp, not an option with most recent XPS models I think? My XPS 7390 has both the SDD and the ram soldered in...bravo, Dell.

 

I have the Dell XPS 13 7390 myself and have changed the SSD.

Check out the service manual at https://www.dell.com/support/manual...1c4068-d888-4bdf-8020-ccc1f7d7781c&lang=en-us

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Ah good to know, so only the RAM is soldered then...I mean I can solder it myself I guess but I don't wanna go through that.

I just wiped it since I don't wanna pay for the extra.

Do you have the 2020 or 2021 version? I got the 2021 7390 2-in-1 and the folding hinge gets really hot even with fan forced to max...is it the same with yours?

 

I bought mine in November 2019. I've not had any problem with heating or thermals.

The fans do go crazy when it's pushed, but I don't usually push it that hard. It's mostly Chrome and basic apps for working etc.

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That's enough to spin the fans up on mine and keep things warm but not insane. Chrome needs to be cleaned up a bit when it comes to bloating out of control when you don't close it often. Shift + Esc is your friend for killing bloated processes though sometimes that will require a chtome://restart to reload dependent processes.

If you want to keep things chill when not doing anything intensive put it in quiet mode and it knocks the CPU down to ~50% of where it is normally and the fans drop as well with the temp.

 

Yeah I'm on the quiet and low performance setting too. Initially, I was quite alarmed by how loud and whiny the fans were, but it's been a non issue as they never kick in now.

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They're always on as there's an alarm if they hit 0%. It's just when they stick under 30-40% they're near silent or detectible. Of course toddlers will hear them but as we age we lose that frequency range as being perceptible. Hearing loss kicks in at an early age and increases slowly over time.

Of course on the desktop side it's easy to manipulate the acoustics with with different cases and larger diameter fans that don't need to spin as fast for the same airflow. Also the case being more spacious allows for more passive cooling to occur.

My fans in the server case sit between 600-800 RPMs with a max of 2K or 2200. The laptop on the other hand can hit up to 5K RPM's due to the limited surface area they have to work with.

 

2 pages and no answer? Or did I miss it?

 

You missed it.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...e-ltsc-2019-2021.833196/page-47#post-11136546

 

The question of whether or not Dell voids your warranty for is not even addressed there... let alone answered.

 

Kind of a moot point since OP already erased and installed Windows on the drive. I find it had to believe that's enforceable though for warranty purposes. The only "warranty" not blowing away the partitions would be the OS installation itself not the HW. If blowing away the drive and not knowing to install the drivers again to make things work would fall under PEBCAK.

 

I haven't found any official statement about it, but there's lots of discussions on the official Dell forums that state that it's fine to delete the partitions.

https://www.dell.com/community/Vostro/What-partitions-can-I-delete/td-p/8111943

From my own experience, I've never heard of any company enforcing the retention of recovery partitions etc.

Even the worst support person in the world will know how to reinstall windows on your laptop using a flash drive etc. So it's doubtful they'll use it as a reason not to honour your warranty.

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I agree, but that is immaterial. I find it odd that we had a couple pages of dialogue that doesnt not actually address the topic's question.

I have not heard of this either, but a point of comfort from a "legalese" point of view is that Dell provides an imaging guide for this machine which would imply they arent actively pursuing enforcement of partitions for warranty purposes.

https://dl.dell.com/topicspdf/xps-13-7390-2-in-1-laptop_administrator-guide_en-us.pdf

 

I mean that's why I asked here, since I have no idea. But saw others comments on Tenforum and a rep from Dell community with that warning...so I backed it up on an external but wiped it already on the laptop.

I might as well call Dell, pretend and ask if my warranty is still good.

Spartan@HIDevolution said he just wipes all...and he's an authorized Dell reseller so maybe it doesn't matter? I think he didn't know I was asking because of the warranty concern.

 

The one thing that seems to hold true over time is that reps are faaaar and away unreliable.

 

True, Dell community website is a joke. Reps seem to only provide generic answers, and other users are the ones giving actual get-around solutions.

I just hope hardwares don't fail so I never need to care about the warranty...

 

I would not void warranty IF the issue at hand is not caused by user deleting the partitions.

I in this case means Dell reseller and authorized repair center Not dell itself though.