REINSTALLING DELL UTILITY DIAGNOSTICS PARTITION

billyjoe32,

If you format the C:\ partition when reinstalling Windows XP you can leave the 32MB partition alone, but it sounds like you used some other application to format the hard disk. You can access the Dell diagnostics from downloads or from copies on a CD among those you received with the system but I am not aware of any method of reloading them into a blank 32MB partition.

denny,

you can if you have a ghost image of that partition saved. I have done it to my i8200 and it works fine. if you want it I can email it to you.

 

I don't have this saved image partition :(  My disk crashed after only one month of use. Dell sent me a new disk, but unformatted and without this diags partition. In adittion to this, my utility & drivers CD is defective, so I cant run any diagnostics at all. I called to Dell support and they said me that after a disk change, it's imposible to have the diagnostics on hard-disk, they will send me another CD.

It could be nice that Dell puts this Utility Partition on every disk that they deliver, or better, put these image partitions online so we can recreate the factory settings. I travel often with my computer and I want the diags on harddisk, not in CD. I don't understand the reason why after a disk crash I cant' recover the factory settings. It's absurd.

if you have the ghost program and want the util image, I can email it to you,it's 2.5 meg. i have replaced my hardrive and put it on and it works fine.

Many thanks Boppo, even your ghost image didn't work at my 9100, I have found the way to recreate an access the dell utility partition.

You can simply create the partition as FAT16 and format it with /s option under win95 or win98. After that, you can load Linux (I've used a SuSE 9 in an alone-cd installation) and change the partition type to 0xDE (Dell Utility) with linux fdisk. After doing that, you still can mount the partition on Linux (I do love this OS) and access the filesystem to copy all files needed to run diagnostics. It works fine. You can update the diagnostics in such way too.

Now I've my own ghost image of the Dell Utility partition for the Inspiron 9100.

Kind regards.

Please check this post for get back the Diagnostic Partition

 

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_harddrive&message.id=33359

 

Any comment, rapco@yahoo.com