Thank you again Ratz. You've shown that it's possible to image the hidden partition. I needed to confirm this, because I was very surprised when Dell replied the following to my query:

"If a user images the drive the ability to run the Dell PC Restore application from the partition, along with the partition, is gone."

mansaie

I have stated, that I imaged my HD with Norton Ghost including a hidden partition. Hidden partition was seen
by Norton Ghost during the process and I assume it is included in the image file. However I did not use this
image to restore my HD yet and therefore can not say with certainty  if it will work. From my experience of
ghosting HD the only difficulty I ran into, was when I actually moved my image file into other location on HD
and it became corrupted. Norton Ghost integrity  check was successful, yet HD could not be restored.  From
now on I have a dedicated partition for images only and it is even excluded by defragmenting program in this
case Diskeeper7. Now the reason I said that is that it applies to the statement made by Dell

 

"If a user images the drive the ability to run the Dell PC Restore application from the partition, along with the
partition, is gone."

 

The way I see it you are actually moving their restore image to another image and during this process it may
become corrupted. Sorry I cannot be more help. Maybe someone else will come up and shine some light on this

subject.

 

Ratz