hidden partitions and partition magic

The diagnostic program will work even if you totally wipe out the restore the partition, and then combine it with your main partition of it you divide up the disk in a number of partitions.  I wiped out the restore partiton and divided the 60 gig hard drive that I have into 4 different partitions and the diagnostic programs are still on the first hidden partition.  I can still boot from the using F12.  This was important to me because Dell in its cost reduction has eliminated the Drivers/Utilites disk that used to contain the diagnostic programs.

 

But like ejn63 mentioned, any change to your C:\ will eliminate the value of the restore partition.

 

 

You can make a CD version of the restore image if you want.

 

There should be an application inside All Programs/dell Accessories/  Dell OS Recovery CD
Run it and it will explain step by step what to do,
you will need a blank NEW CD for it.
It will act As the OS recovery  CD

 

I think the utility CD (called "Resource CD" or something) does more than the utility in the hidden partion (mine is Dimension 8400), such as graphics diagnosis, making SATA diskettes, etc. so, with a utility CD, even the first hidden partition is useless. am I right?

 

the thing I do not understand is why the symantec restore partition would be rendered useless when only other partitions have changed (such as C:). I remeber once I moved an OS from the D: partition to E: partition on a dual boot machine with just one hard disk. I used Drive Image 5 to create an image of D:, then restored the image to E:. With just one line change in C:\boot.ini, the whole thing went smoothly.