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35 Posts

8866

February 28th, 2007 02:00

Unknown Partition

I was looking through disk manager under administrative tools and I found a partiton on my hard drive that is unknown. It reads "4.64 GB FAT32 Healthy (Unknown Partition). Does anyone know what this might be. I want to free up a little hard drive space and was considering deleting it, but I don't want to mess anything up.

2 Intern

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2.2K Posts

February 28th, 2007 05:00

That would probably be the partition containing the Dell PC Restore utility and image.
 
GM

35 Posts

February 28th, 2007 05:00

Is it really neccesary? I don't want to delete anything valuable.

6.4K Posts

February 28th, 2007 17:00

It's only necessary if you ever want to restore your PC to the exact state it was in when it was delivered to you.  The restore partition has all the software that was delivered with the machine.  if you delete it you will only be able to put back what you have on the CD's that were delivered with the computer.  This is ideal for some users since they don't want all the extras that Dell puts in, such as trial ware.  The choice is yours.
 

35 Posts

March 1st, 2007 02:00

I'm on the fence because I don't think I have my video card drivers. I need to use the specific driver that came with my machine because whenever I try to update them, it messes it up. So I just stick with the old driver. I think that's all I would need though, that's why I don't know if I should just delete it or not. I don't plan on formatting my computer anytime soon but you never know what could happen.

2 Intern

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2.2K Posts

March 1st, 2007 04:00

Look on the video driver download page for a link to "Other Versions". Dell usually keeps previous versions available, unless there is a good reason to limit access.

GM

6.4K Posts

March 1st, 2007 14:00

One other place you might try looking is on your hard drive; C:\Drivers and C:\Dell\Drivers.  My Inspiron 5160 came with both.  The first directory has the drivers in folders with descriptive names such as video and audio.  The second has the drivers in folders with names beginning with "R" and having from five to six digits.  Some of them have a setup program contained in the directory, others do not, but if you have the files on your hard drive you can always use the "Update Driver" function in the Device Manager to install them on your computer.
 
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