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Anybody know what the CTOS partition is?

Posted: Sat May 28, 2005 5:43 am
by Chris Corbyn
Hi,

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 :?

I could use the extra space,

Cheers.

Posted: Sat May 28, 2005 5:56 am
by JAM
http://radified.com/blog/archives/000141.html
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.

Posted: Sat May 28, 2005 6:14 am
by Chris Corbyn
Thanks that helps.

I think I'll go ahead and delete it (I know i'll regret it later :P)

Thanks again :D

Posted: Sat May 28, 2005 8:47 am
by timvw
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...)

Posted: Sat May 28, 2005 12:12 pm
by Chris Corbyn
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).

It's good of Dell to think to include it though :)

Posted: Sat May 28, 2005 1:34 pm
by JAM
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.