On Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:39:16 -0700, robgraham wrote:

On 23 Aug, 13:24, "Robin" wrote:
The smaller partition is (from memory so almost certainly) Dell's
diagnostics. Â*You can run these at bootup using F12. Â*See eg Dell's
guidance for the Dimension
5000http://support.dell.com/support/systemsinfo/document.aspx?
c=us&l=en&s...

I agree the other partition will be for you to Restore the system to
the way it shipped. Â*Not a good idea unless you want to spend many a
happy hour reinstalling software, service packs etc Â*But worth keeping
unless you are desperate for disk space.
--
Robin
PM may be sent to rbw0{at}hotmail{dot}com

Many thanks, Robin. I take it then that this suggestion from 'a friend'
is incorrect
"All NTFS formatted drives still require to have a FAT 16/32 partition
(or 2) to facilitate boot-up. Bios's can't read NTFS because it is
requires the OS (Windows or otherwise) to be loaded first. " ??

That seems incorrect to me...

From memory (mine, not the computer's!), the BIOS loads* the first 512
bytes from the start of the hard disk into the machine's memory and
excutes the code that it finds there; it knows nothing of what the
filesystem format is. The code that it loads and executes is responsible
for booting the actual OS (and loading whatever drivers to access the
rest of the disk are necessary, whether it be FAT or NTFS or any of the
other hundreds of filesystem formats that have existed over the years)

* broadly-speaking; it's a little bit more complex than that, because the
code to access the boot device isn't necessarily part of the
motherboard's BIOS itself (and may live on a SCSI controller, network
board etc.)

cheers

Jules