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Can I Delete these Partitions?
I have an XPS400 with a 1T disk drive. The drive is partitioned as follows:
C:/ Win XP Partition - primary -NTFS 293GB (47GB used)
unnamed Partition #1: 0xDB (Concurrent Dos, CTOS) - primary - FAT32 29GB (4GB used)
unnamed Partition #2: 0xDE (Eisa Configuration) - primary - FAT16 345MB (8MB used)
F:/ Data Partition - logical - NTFS 489GB (120GB)
unallocated space: 120GB
I plan to partition the unallocated space into G:/ (primary) onto which I will load Win 7. Here are my questions:
1. What purpose do the 2 unnamed partitons serve? They both include folders labelled Dell. Disk recovery?
2. Can I delete one or both of the unnamed partitions?
Thank you in advance for your help...Art
osprey4
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February 4th, 2012 17:00
H Art,
The FAT16 partition is the utility partition containing the Dell diagnostics and the FAT32 partition is the PC Restore utility.
You can safely delete both of these but only if you are planning a clean installation of one or both operating systems.
lupine1945
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February 4th, 2012 17:00
Thanks for info Osprey4. I have further questions:
1) The Restore partition sounds important in the event of a crash since I do not have any CDs with WinXP or pre-installed SW. On the other hand, I do Seagate (Acronis) image backups so I'm guessing I wouldn't need the CDs to get XP back to its current state. Is this correct or am I missing something?
2) If I leave Restore as primary, then could I change the Dell diagnostics partition to logical so that I can add a new primary for Win 7 from the unallocacted section? Or, will I have too many partitions at that point?
3) If 5 partitions are too many, then could I carve out another partition (extended) from my F:/ and load Win 7 on that? I understand Win 7 does not neet a primary partition. Would this work?
I'm using EaseUS Partition Master (free version).
osprey4
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February 5th, 2012 03:00
I still don't know what your objective is.
lupine1945
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February 5th, 2012 10:00
My objective is to load Win 7 on a separate partition from XP so that I can dual-boot my system. XP is nearing end of support life and more and more SW will not run on it. For instance, TurboTax2011 will not run on my version of XP (Media) because TT requires Microsoft .NET 4, which is nor supported on Media XP. Just trying to squeeze another year out of my PC.
ejn63
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February 5th, 2012 10:00
Doing that will render the quick restore useless, so make sure if you will need to do such a restore, you prepare your own restore image on an external drive.