The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Reformat / reinstall on new laptop. Partitions query.

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by Jack Slack, Feb 2, 2012.

  1. Jack Slack

    Jack Slack Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    29
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Bought a new Dell laptop. Preparing to reformat / reinstall so its setup how I want it.

    There are two disks.

    Disk 0 - 320gb - I want this as my data drive (D :)
    Disk 1 - 128gb - I want this as my primary drive (C :)

    Disk 1 currently has 3 partitions.

    Partition 0 - 101gb - OS (C :)
    Partition 1 - 40mb - oem reserved - hidden
    Partition 2 - 25gb - system recovery (F :) - hidden

    Do I really need these partitions? Can I get rid of them?

    I am old school when my primary drive gets messed up. I just reformat the disk, reinstall from scratch, and patch with latest updates from the net. I've never used an image restore - nor had the urge / need to.

    Comments?

    Thanks in advance.
     
    Jack Slack, Feb 2, 2012
    #1
  2. Commander Wolf

    Commander Wolf can i haz broadwell?

    Reputations:
    2,962
    Messages:
    8,231
    Likes Received:
    63
    Trophy Points:
    216
    Partition 1 is the diagnostics partition and Partition 2 is the recovery partition. Obviously, if you can manage your own diagnostics and OS recovery, you don't need them.
     
    Commander Wolf, Feb 2, 2012
    #2