What is the purpose of the xps1330 recovery partition?

And why does it need to be so large? Any suggestions for optimizing this function (using less space) on a reformat, or can it be eliminated entirely?

Thanks,

GRPCV

 

No...you cant reduce it and if you want to eliminate it entirely see my Clean Install article below.

If you don't want MD3 installed, just throw the OS disk and ignore the part about MD3.

Clean install is the best as, nt only do you regain space there but, you get rid of all the garbage bloatware and useless Dell set registry entries that slow your system down.

Once done there hit it with my tweak article below...

 

I got rid of it entirely... well, actually I formatted it and installed Windows XP on it

 

Thanks, all, and Flamenko, I've read your valuable articles. My question is...is the recovery partition necessary? What is its intended use?

Also, has anyone been having trouble with the ethernet port on their xps m1330?

 

The main point of having a recovery partition is so that if for some reason you mess around with the main partition (default C:\), then you have a backup of all the critical windows installation files. Alongside the recovery disks that came in the box you should be able to restore your laptop to working condition. I just copied the recovery files to an external hard drive, cleaned it, and use it as Ubuntu. If I can get around the tty error. Sweet... .

 

What Duke said and no the drivers for all devices are on the recovery disk

 

Isn't the recovery CD enough? If you have the recovery CD, plus all your important stuff backed up, would it be safe to go without a recovery CD?

 

You mean without a recovery partition? Yes, if you backup your data and you have the drivers and OS CD, you do not need the recovery partition.

The advantage to the partition is that if you are on the road and your main partition gets messed up, as long as your data is backed up, you can be up and running in a few minutes without needing any CDs to reload the OS.

As far as the bloatware issue is concerned, it was no problem for me; after a few tweaks, I was able to boot up my M1330 in Dell's factory-installed Vista on a 160GB 7200RPM drive with 4 GB RAM in 20 seconds from logo to sign-in, so do think twice before arbitrarily wiping your drive. I did reformat my main partition and left everything else as is so my recovery option should work, in the unlikely even I need to use it.

 

Thanks, Samuel, that's helpful.

I'm just looking hungrily at the extra space on the recovery drive, and though Flamenko's guide to clean-install looks comprehensive, I think I can get a lot of bloat off my drive with ccleaner and other uninstallers.

 

I couldn't get Dell PC Restore to work on M1330 so I did a clean installation per Flamenko's instructions. Everything is working fine and recovered all the unused disk space.

 

Actually DELL's recovery partition merely restores an image of the partition back on the hard drive or IOW brings the system to default factory configuration with all the DELL bloatware installed too....