My thanks go to Brett for his comments posted on Ed Bott’s blog about Dell’s hidden restore partitions.

I originally posted this message in the comments, but it was too long and got cut off midway. Here is the complete message, including some interesting utilities and tools I found within the Ghost Recovery Console built into some new Dell Dimension 1100 computers. This article is fairly technical and probably only of interest to other techies.

Here is the information from some Dell Dimension 1100’s purchased earlier this month. According to Windows, here are the partitions:

1: 31MB FAT EISA (Diagnostic Utilities)
2: 52.71GB NTFS System (Main data partition)
3: 18.51GB NTFS Backup (Ghost Backup uses this)
4: 3.26GB FAT32 Unknown (Dell’s Recovery image)

(Don’t you love how the “80GB” HDD only has 52GB of usable space?)

According to PTEdit32:

[code]Type, Boot, Start Cyl, Hd, Sct, End Cyl, Hd, Sct, Before, Sectors

DE, 00, 0, 1, 1, 3, 254, 63, 63, 64197
07, 80, 4, 0, 1, 1023, 254, 63, 64260, 110543265
07, 00, 1023, 0, 1, 1023, 254, 63, 110607525, 38813040
DB, 00, 1023, 0, 1, 1023, 254, 63, 149420565, 6827625, 6827625
[/code]
As in Bret’s case, the utility and recovery partitions were set to invalid types (DE and DB respectively). Using PTEdit32 (which allows you to make changes from within Windows XP; very cool!), I changed the types to 04 (FAT 16 <32MB) and 0C (FAT32) respectively. After rebooting the computer, the volumes showed up as ordinary drives in Windows (drives F: and G: to be exact).

It was very easy then to see what information was inside the partitions. Pretty much exactly what you would expect: system diagnostics and recovery utilities and a bootable recovery version of Ghost.

The process was completely reversible. I just changed the types back to DE and DB, rebooted, and everything was back to normal. Obligatory WARNING Statement: I am a certified network engineer with nearly 20 years of experience; I kind of know what I’m doing when it comes to this stuff. I also didn’t have any data on the computer that would matter if it were lost. If that doesn’t describe your situation, then please be very, very, very careful if you try this yourself. One tiny mistake (or just a bit of bad luck), and your hard drive could end up ruined, along with the data that used to be on it.

Just for curiosity’s sake, I booted into the recovery system. The EULA from Symantec states:

There are technological measures in this Software that are designed to prevent unlicensed or illegal use of the Software. You agree that Symantec may use these measures to protect Syantec against software piracy. This Software may contain enforcement technology that limits the ability to install and uninstall the Software on a computer to not more than a finite number of times for a finite number of computers. …

(Any typos in the preceding are my own, as is the added emphasis.)

I realize that basically this (much longer) paragraph appears to mainly be discussing Windows Activation, but the thing that worries me (or would if I was relying on this to recover my system), is just how many times can I recover my computer before the software refuses to restore it anymore?

I have friends who as a matter of policy reformat their hard drives every few months. (Apparently they find this easier than taking proper care of their computers in the first place with antimalware software, etc., but that’s a whole other discussion.) Would they suddenly be informed that they had exceeded the “finite” number of reinstallations and could no longer recover their PCs? At least with a CD-ROM (or DVD) you can recover as often as you want without relying upon time-bombmed (well, counter bombed would probably be the more accurate analogy) technology.

One interesting feature of the recovery system is that if you go under “Utilities” you can Delete the Backup Drive. Essentially it removes the D: drive (partition 3 above) and extends the C: drive (partition 2) into the freed-up space. That’s a pretty cool feature I’m sure a lot of people would love to know about.

Another sweet feature (or set of features) is you can 1) configure and enable networking, 2) browse and mount the file systems, and 3) attach to network drives, and 4) theoretically recover lost files from a corrupted or infected disk without having to use BartPE or any other recovery tools. There’s also Norton Disk Doctor, an Antivirus scanner, and some other tools that could be useful in some situations. There’s even a Symantec Thin Client available. While I still like having a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM for recovery, I do have to admit there are some cool features hidden away here.

After all this, I now plan to keep the 31MB EISA partition as-is, since it can be sort of handy at times. But the recovery partition is more of a liability than a blessing. In part because of the whole finite number of recoveries and also since it could theoretically wipe out all the customizations that I plan to make to the system. I’m just going to remove it, along with the non-hidden backup partition, and extend the main partition into all that lovely freed-up space. I have other ways of performing backups that I’m much happier with.