Del PC Restore utility, dp.sc access denied

When my machine was running XP I tried to do the Dell restore from the secret partition. It failed miserable at every attempt, various errors were cited, different each time. I ran numerous disk checks all came back fine, although I did notice that the huge partition they allocated for this only actually had just under 400 meg of data on it, the rest was empty. I could not gain access by any method to that partition either, so when I installed Vista I just got rid of that partition. I just manually back up my stuff I wish to keep. It is very handy that the Dell Vista upgrade can do the clean install thing too, that is how I initially installed it, completely obliterated the old XP install.