EISA partition

Half of the hard drive capacity does not sound right for the Dell recovery partition.  Generally it's only a very small partition.  However, I don't know if Partition Magic would recover that or not.  You may have to "F Disk" the hard drive to recover the full 80GB and then reinstall everything. 

Considering the cheap price of hard drives and that 80GB is "small" you may want to just keep the drive as is for backup and buy a new larger drive and reinstall everything on the new drive.  If your system will handle a larger drive that is probably the smartest option. 

BTW, there is a Disk Drive section on the forum.

Thanks for that, As I will have to probably reinstall everything to get the full 80Gb I might as well install a larger drive. I am no expert and would be scared to try and sort out the current drive in case I lose everything. i have Acronis but if I use that to copy a disk image to a new drive I suppose I will just copy all the problems as well. I have a Dimension 3100 which I understand will take up to 250GB.

Many thanks

One other thing, if I get a new drive and do a clean installation using the Dell XP reinstallation disk that I have will it include the Dell EISA partition? I have only tried to use the reinstallation once and it did not work. I see no point in putting a 39gb reinstallation partition on a HD. If the drive completely fails you have lost everything.

Thanks

Hi robinj37, If you use your disc to reinstall XP, then you wont get the EISA partition, as that is put on your HD at the factory.

But, look on the bright side, you wont have to install any junk that comes with the system, and HERE is a journal on how to do a manual install.