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Just been looking at the partition table of my Dell Inspiron Laptop (no comments please) and it comes with a 3.5GB CTOS (?!) partition at the end of the disk.
I've had the machine for nearly a year and never even noticed.
Anybody know why Dell put it there or what it's for? Will I bugger something up if I delete it? (I don't see why cos it's got it's own NTFS and Reiser Partitions anyway). I thought it might be the Dell utuility partition you can boot inot from the BIOS but that's on a 512MB FAT partition at the start of the disk
The page above wrote:Looks like da boyz at DELL have begun including a Ghost image with their latest computers (at least, with their laptops). See HERE. They used to provide a Restore CD, but you can only include so much data on a CD.
DELL is including the Ghost image at the very END of the hard drive, where hard drive performance is slowest (good idea). There they create a separate partition, which takes up ~3.5GBs. With hard drive capacities growing so large, even with laptop computers, allocating 3.5-GB of disk space to a Ghost image is no problem.
as long as you have the original cds to install your os and applications from, there is no problem (mind that the "restore" cd just isn't good enough...)
timvw wrote:as long as you have the original cds to install your os and applications from, there is no problem (mind that the "restore" cd just isn't good enough...)
It came with Windows XP Home so to be honest I'm not even that bothered.
I do have some stuff on there but anyhting important (i.e. work) is backed up in several places already. I'm practically gonna give all the space to reiser anyway and just have a small partition for windows (because just sometimes it's handy to have).
I noticed this upon getting my Dell XPS also. It had a partition that flashed "Clicking me will restore your computer to it's previously state!" i big, red letters across the screen... I also have a friend that bought a Dell the other year mentioned the same.
Apparently it "something they do" as customer support. They sell pretty much, and having that partition there takes a big load of the support when less fourtunate users with issues call them I guess. (Personal thoughts of course).
I wasted my partition aprox. 1½ minutes after recieving my computer so I'm not sure myself that it all that handy to have.