What partitions can I wipe?

There's a been a lot of topics here about how to reinstall Vista and all, but I had a bit of a different question.

I guess it kind of comes down to, do the reinstallation discs Dell provides have all the data on them to reinstall or do they use files on the partitions to help reinstall? I know there's a storage partition, recovery, Dell Media Direct, and windows vista.. I'd like to wipe ALL of them and make them into one. After they're all gone, can I reinstall everything from the CDs or did I get rid of crucial install files?

Also, for those of you who kept your "Recovery" partition: Is it worth the extra HDD space? I figure you can just use all your reinstall discs if you need to start with a fresh copy of Windows.

 

I just wiped out every partition, reinstalled using the dell OS disk (vista business in my case) and most drivers were installed already by Vista. Few things like the card reader, webcam, graphics card and sound needed the proper drivers but they are all on the excellent resource disk anyway.

Mine is a Vostro 1500 btw, my recovery partition was 10gig and I had a 2.5gig media direct one.

 

So you can in fact get rid of the "recovery" partition? I can't really see much use for it, personally.

 

Were you able to successfully reinstall Mediadirect?

 

Wipe the recovery partition. Only reason you MAY need it in the future is if you want to resell the laptop w/ everything at default factory settings

Most won't care though if its a clean install. You save them trouble.

The mediadirect reinstall was successful for me

 

The gluteal cleft?

 

Yes. I agree.

 

What's MediaDirect anyways? I wiped all my partitions and put XP on without a problem and have every device on the laptop working fully functional.. except that I can't test Bluetooth since I don't have any Bluetooth devices (except for my iPhone).

 

MediaDirect is a small, second operating system provided by Dell. It takes up 2.5GB and it allows you to watch movies and other multimedia (photos and I think music) through the Dell MediaDirect Player without loading the computer onto Windows. I guess it's just quicker if you just want to watch a movie right away; I suppose it saves some battery power, too. (Correct me if I'm wrong)

 

So essentially everything that you get on the computer is on the discs provided and all partitions can be wiped and merged?

 

If you have to regenerate the smaller partitions, it is not completely trivial. The MediaDirect partition in particular takes a certain number of non-obvious steps. The instructions are supplied or easily obtained, but still, you should not get rid of the MediaDirect partition if you are likely to want it back.

The recovery partition is not needed if you have the original DVDs, but it may still be a good idea to put a recovery image on an external hard disk or on DVDs. That way it is a one-step process, as opposed to installing the vanilla OS and then installing the ldrivers from the Dell disk. Plus you have a second method if there is any problem with the first method.

 

Hmm.. MediaDirect "sounds" neat.. but is it really worth it? Does it allow movie playback via the VGA port as well when in MediaDirect mode?

 

I will likely back up the recovery partition to some disks... What about the Vista/OS partition? There are no files on there that are not on the reinstallation disks, right? So the OS partition can be wiped, too, without causing future problems.

No experience with MediaDirect as of yet; I would like to know this, too.

 

Right. But it's nice to have a fallback position in case a DVD turns out to be bad, or something.

If you have copied the entire Recovery partition to an external hard disk, that should work fine for this purpose. The recovery partition contains the undocumented imagex.exe command-line program that Dell uses to make images and also to restore via the F8 pre-boot menu; the Vista disk also contains this program. If you ever need to restore from the recovery partition image, which you probably won't, you can find instructions on the web.

 

I wiped off recovery, but when I did it I ran into something that freaked me out. I would reinstall vista and the completing installation stage took forever!!! So if you do decide to do that and this happens to you, go here and it will work

http://forum.notebookreview.com/show...&postcount=140

 

so is it safe to wipe out the "recovery partition" or not?

 

you can get rid of every single partition you have. it will still let you install vista
just fine. beware, if you delete the media direct partition and press the media direct key while it is turned off, it will still try to start media direct and then BSOD. im working on a way to remap it so it will either be a secondary power button or so that it will boot into linux, which i have currently not installed as of yet.

 

I read somewhere that MediaDirect partition was difficult to remove, as you don't see it when you pop in a XP/Vista CD.. But I saw my MediaDirect partition just fine.. Shrug.

 

Could I copy that recovery partition, say to a DVD. I could always copy it back to the machine if I wanted to perform a Dell reinstall?

 

same with me.

 

Well it's true, even after I thought XP detected all the partitions and I deleted every single one of them, I can hit the MediaDirect button and it still loads up MediaDirect.. How do I completely remove the MediaDirect partition? Some type of low-level format?