FAT/NTFS Partition on Factory HD, Do this on 2nd drive too?

Hi everyone,

I installed a second drive on my Dell and while formatting noticed that there is one 32 MB partition on the factory installed drive that is FAT and the rest of the drive (system partition) is NTFS. The OS is XP. Anyone know why this FAT partition is there and if there's any reason to format the 2nd drive this way? I'm considering moving XP to the 2nd (smaller) drive to free up the bigger drive for large streaming files, but not sure yet. What about in that case? If the new drive ends up being the system drive, then do I have to partition it as Dell did on the bigger drive?

Thanks much!

Dave

 

Others will jump in as well, but, until then,
Could that be a hidden partition that was for "restore" purposes?

 

If it's any help, the disk manager refers to the drive as having an EISA configuration.

 

Hello again, Dave.
I strongly suspect that this is the situation:
from this page here:
http://www.bay-wolf.com/harddrive.htm#4
We find this information:

This page is run by a person(s) that are really into Dell. I know because I have a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop that was given to me, and I had to really get "into the Dell scene" in order to repair it, etc...

Looks like it is not needed, but, perhaps you could back it up? Or keep it?
Could you spare the room to do this?

 

Please go to this link and scroll all the way down to Response #22!

Hope it helps...

 

Well, until someone more savvy posts here in this thread, my last 2 cents is
this:

If you are reading this message board (which you obviously are), then you are positioning yourself to be what the above page linked to characterizes as an "advanced user", so, in that case, you may just want to "go for it", and definitely not include that "extra" FAT 32 "rescue" partition.

Why?

Because if you are resourceful enough to be HERE, then, any problems that you run into with your OS in the future can be resolved by the support that you find HERE.

Good luck, and let us know how you get on with it.

Also, one last thing...
If you do come up with the identifying parameters needed (model #, and such things) for us to look at any specific documentation on the Dell website particular to your computer machine, we can do that, too.