partitioning, reformating, reinstall OS

[greyowl]

I recently reinstalled the Operating System on a Dell Latitude E6400. I appreciate the help I received from the forum.

I am now wondering if I could have done it differently.

The drive had been divided into C and D partitions. The C partition was a 100mb partition that said "system reserved". The old operation system was on D partition. I considered changing the partition to make the drive just one partition © and install XP on it. However, I got a warning that removing the stuff on C drive would make the computer not boot until I installed XP, so I got cold feet and installed XP on the D drive partition. Now when I install the drivers and apps, they default to install on the C partition which obviously has no space so I have to change the destination on everything.

I am wondering what this 100mb partition is all about and what is its benefit. I am also wondering if I could just create on partition and install XP on it like I have done with other laptops and whether it would work fine.

I hope someone understands this and can explain it to me.

Thank you

[David H. Lipman]

The drive has two partitions BUT...  the 100MB "reserved" partition is not mounted and thus should have no drive letter making the rest of the hard disk a "C:" drive.
 
Please reference:  Reserved Partition
 
Since 100MB is so small in comparison to 100's of GigaBytes, it is insignificant and my advice is "If you have to ask about it, just leave it alone."

[AdvancedSetup]

The 100MB partition is from a Windows 7 installation.  You can actually prevent that by using a per-formatted drive which can be done during the install. 

Often the D: volume for many computer MFG is used for doing a Factory System Recovery back to the way it was when you bought the computer.  If you're not concerned about it then you can typically remove all partitions though again if this is a OEM MFG like Dell, Sony, Lenovo, etc then you may want or need to follow their directions on a reinstall as sometimes their MBR (Master Boot Record) contains information to allow custom keys such as F11 - F12 or similar to do special functions.

 

If installing Windows 7 you can typically run the following to clean the disk of any information and then set it as the primary disk and then install Windows 7 from DVD.

 

Press the SHIFT – F10 key for DOS prompt Diskpartselect disk 0cleancreate partition primarylist partitionformat fs = ntfs quick

On the other hand if you're installing Windows XP again from CD then boot from the CD and when it gets to the partition information of where to install delete all partitions and confirm, then install to the disk and it will create a new C: volume and install XP using all available disk space as a single volume.

[greyowl]

Thank you for the information. I will try this and report back tomorrow.