dell reformat/reinstall question

Hey all, new oster here, but been reading the forums for a while now.

Recently recieved my dell 8600 and i'm loving it to pieces, don't mind the extra size vs the portability that some of the smaller models may have offered, bat life and the screen more than make up for it for my purposes. Plus with the writing I do, the fullsized keyboard is terrific.

Anyway, back to topic at hand, I'm looking to do a clean reformat of the system simply because all of the bundled dell stuff is nigh useless to me and serves no real purpose. However upon checking xp's disk management I notice that I have three partitions

1 FAT EISA Configuration partition (47mb)
1 unlabeled FAT32 partition (3.49gb)
and my C drive (52.34gb)

My assumption is that the larger hidden partition is merely restoration software that I have no real need of, since I'm reformatting to get rid of it anyway.

The EISA partition is what I'm curious about -- while it's not large enough to concern me as far as taking up space, it's mostly curiosity as to what purpose it serves in the laptops operation and why it's necessary (if at all). Can anybody enlighten me on this particular quirk? My much older dell laptop had no such creature, so it's new to me.

Thanks~

 

Here is how I got rid of the hidden partitions on my new Inspiron 600m. Did not like the 5GB hidden from me and no mention of this in any user guide!

The "configuration" partition contains code that gets booted first. This is what displays the blue strip on top of the screen. It then boots windows. Presumably tech support could instruct the user to press some secret keys and do things.

1. Make an image of the drive first if you want to keep anything on it! It is very easy to mess up the disk to the point in needs to be completely reformatted.
2. Delete both hidden partitions by something like Partition Magic or some kind of manufactured utility. You cannot touch the hidden partitions in windows xp disk management. Maybe you could delete the hidden partitions in the recovery console (next) or linux fdisk, I did not try that. Maybe you could delete just the big 3rd
partition, the machine would be OK and you would be done. I did not try that either.
3. After you delete both hidden partitions the machine is unbootable. Boot from the Windows "reinstallation" CD that came with the laptop press R on the setup menu to get into recovery console
4. In recovery console create a small 3rd partition using DISKPART. Then delete it again. I had to do that to overwrite the Dell nonstandard partition table. Create new MBR using FIXMBR. Ignore the warnings about corrupt MBR (yes, Dell messed with the Master Boot Record). Say FIXBOOT for a good measure too. Repeat until the machine boots.

Worked for me. Your mileage may vary. Be prepared to reformat or reinstall from disk image if something goes wrong.

To image the disk you can use for example Apricorn EZ upgrade but then you need a big USB drive. Or boot from linux installation CD or floppy or a Linux on CD (like Knoppix) and dd the whole /dev/hda as a single file to another machine over the network to an NFS mounted volume.