Hello Jeffrey,

I do not have an answer to your question, but would appreciate picking your
brain for a moment on something you mentioned in your post.

I just purchased a Dell Dimension 4100 and not more than a few days out of
the box had problems with system freezes, lockups, strange (intermittent)
faulty boot behaviours, shutdown problems etc. Dell technical support
advised me to do a full format/restore since they felt the most likely
culprit was a corrupt OS. Why the machine should need a format/re-install of
the OS (Win98SE) after 10 days of receipt of a band new system remains a
bone of great contention. Bottom line - I did the reform/reinstall and
indeed it seems to have solved most of the problems. Whether Dell shipped me
a faulty OS or whether I mucked it up in the first day or 2 will of course
never be known.

One of the first things I did when I got the system was to use Partition
Magic 6.0 to repartition the 40G hard drive into C/D/E/F partitions. Dell
support techs told me that officially Dell only supports a single C:
partition. Even the Recovery CD failed to work for me since it was unable to
find the files on my DVD-ROM since the DVD was an G: or H: drive and it
would not recognize it. I believe their Recovery CD looks only for CD Drives
that are assigned as D: or E: or some such nonsense.

Also, though, one or more of them also told me that Partition Magic should
not be used since it does not work the same way as FDISK. I have always
regarded Partition Magic as a rock-solid program and felt that maybe they
were just covering their asses so to speak.

In light of your post, however, maybe some of this is starting to make sense
to me.

Can you tell me a bit more about the notion of ghosting the factory image to
a reserved area on the drive? Of course, I would have blown this away as
soon as I re-partitioned the drive. What would the consequences of this have
been. Could Partition Magic really then have caused the problems I had, not
because PM is a problem in itself, but rather because it interferes with
Dell's "set-up" which of course they do not reference anywhere that I have
ever seen.

Any education on this subject that you can provide for me would be most
gratefully appreciated.

Michael


 -----Original Message-----
From:   PCSOFT - Personal Computer software discussion list
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As things stand, coutless frustrated Dell owners (myself included) must
contend with the fact that instead of offering a simple, bullet proof system
restore/recovery CD, Dell has chosen to ghost the factory image to a
reserved area on the hard drive.  This seems like a workable solution, but
it rarely if ever works (and has never worked in my experience) because the
ghosted image is usually corrupted almost immediately after unpacking by
routine hard disk use and maintenance.

As for PartitionMagic...forget it;  you can instantly kiss the ghosted image
goodbye if you let PM do its' thing.  I could go on about the maddening
aspects of working with Dell machines, but that's a topic for another
thread.

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