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Reformating Dell 700M

P

polish

Junior Member
After running into several major issues with my Dell, I have decided to reformat. The laptop came with XP Home and I'm planning in installing XP Pro. After booting from the XP Pro cd, and arriving at the partition selection/deletion tool, I saw the following:

-: Partition 1[FAT] ~50MB
C: Partition 2[NTFS] ~35000MB
Unpartitioned ~5000MB
D: Partition 4[FAT32] ~13500MB
F: Partition 3[FAT32] ~3500MB
Unpartitioned ~10MB

So, my question is: Can I delete all of the partitions, reformat the entire HD, and install a fresh copy of XP Pro, or, do I have too keep all of the partitions and simply install over Partition 2?

I'm just not sure if the other partitions are necessary for the laptop to operate properly.

Thanks in advance for any help that you can provide.
 
One of the partitions is probably for the suspend or sleep mode. I think if you delete them all then you would lose that function.

Other than that if you're going to do a standard install of windows then it would work fine to delete them all.
 
If you do a standard Win XP install you'll still have suspend and hybernate capabilities wihtout any special partitioning. Dell includes a "self restore" capability. One of those partitions has a image of your C:\ drive on it so that the laptop can be re-imaged without CD's or DVD's.
 
The easy answer is Yes -- you can just blow away the partitions and it will work fine. The 50MB partition is in all liklihood a utility parition. You probably have some "hit F12 for diags" option at boot, and if you choose that it boots to the 50MB partition. I would leave this alone. You can probably download diskettes to do it but 50MB isn't much space.

Not sure what the other partitons are for, but they certainly aren't necessary for the system to run. One of them may have files to do a rebuild if your system crashes, but sicne you have a CD that's not really necesssary.

You might want to consider having a 5-6GB partition for XP, and put all of your data program files on a different partition. That way if your system crashes or you need to reinstall, it's easy to do so without losing your data.

 
Originally posted by: doan
If you do a standard Win XP install you'll still have suspend and hybernate capabilities wihtout any special partitioning. Dell includes a "self restore" capability. One of those partitions has a image of your C:\ drive on it so that the laptop can be re-imaged without CD's or DVD's.
Click to expand...

Interesting... does this mean that a Hard Disk that Dell advertises as, say, 40 GB actually holds 50 (or whatever the math works out to)?
Or do you just have the 40 GB HDD with slightly reduced capacity (due to the hidden partitions?)

Edited to put in the quote...
 
It means you have a 40Gb HDD with less space because of the hidden partitions. If I were you, I would just wipe all of them. That is what I usually do when I reformat laptops.
 
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