Removing Extra Partitions?

Question

Hi.

I just purchased an Inspiron 1150. I need to add both Linux (for work) and Windows 98 (for some older games for my kids) to the existing Windows XP Home setup. However, the hard drive has three primary partitions set up already, and there isn't room in the partition table to add two more.

From what I have read elsewhere, the first partition (a small 47MB FAT16 partition) contains diagnostics tools, and can be safely removed, as the diagnostics tools are available elsewhere. Is this correct? The second partition is the main Windows XP partition and can obviously not be deleted if I want to keep Windows XP installed. The third is a 3GB FAT32 partition, and appears to be a system restore image of some kind. For what purposes would I need to keep this on the system? What would I lose if it were to get deleted?

Thank you.

johnallg · Answer

If it is a restore image, if you ever wanted to return to a just-as-delivered configuration you would not be able to.  Of course you could Ghost burn that partition onto a cd and probably get back that way.

Squinter2 · Answer

Thanks, John. Is there a big difference between the just-as-delivered configuration and what I would get if I reinstalled from the XP reinstallation CD?

Ed C · Answer

Yes you wouldn't be installing all the JUNK software Dell includes with a install from the CD disk.

johnallg · Answer

-  Ed's rght.

Squinter2 · Answer

No, I haven't tried many of the games in question in Windows XP. This laptop is my first computer with Windows XP. I was given a set of older Windows games by some friends who said they 'couldn't use them' on their newer computers (also running Windows XP). Thanks for the tip regarding compatability mode.

NemesisDB · Answer

Have you tried XP's compatability mode for the win98 games?  All of my old win95 era games (excluding the trueDOS ones) will run fine in XP given the right settings.

NemesisDB · Answer

Yup Yup ... you should just be able to right click the executable file (or even the shortcut possibly). The third tab (farthest to the right) should be called compatibility.

Click "run this program in compatibility mode" and select the OS of your choice. If the game is from the win3.11 era or a dos-game, you may still have problems. Trying some of the visual options may also help.

thetaomega · Answer

To elaborate on that restore partition a bit more:

1. The restore partition itself actually contains a Ghost image (FI.gho + any spanned files). This Ghost image is a disk image of the factory-installation of the hard drive, containing both the diagnostic partition and the Windows XP partition.

2. While the factory-install may contain Dell-added software you didn't really want or need, one advantage it does have is that all the necessary drivers come pre-installed. That's one thing to look out for should you decide to reinstall Windows XP from scratch -- you might end up spending a considerable amount of time ensuring that all of the drivers for Dell-specific devices are installed, since it is possible that not all of your devices may be working upon initial reinstallation. A restore operation from the Ghost image will probably take less than 20 minutes; reinstallation of WinXP and all the necessary drivers will likely take hours.

Personally, what I've done is to extract out the FI.gho image (by running Ghost, then extracting that file from the image file using Ghost Explorer) and then stick it onto a bootable DVD (I have the 8X DVD burner). Then I went ahead and deleted that partition, and then did the ghost restore. Ghost can repartition the restore partition on the fly during the restoration; Ghost also comes with GDISK, which is a command-line FAT32 partition utility that is significantly better than the FDISK that came with Win9X and DOS.

Hope this helps.

-thetaomega

Storage, Drives & Media

Removing Extra Partitions?

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