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Dell Utility Partition Quick Removal

Just a quick post on how to quickly remove the Dell Utility Partition. I just received some Poweredge T105 boxes (quiet nice actually ,very quiet, very efficient – only 70W power consumption idle with 2 80gb drives). I was bummed to find out that the bios didnt come with a SATA raid option, but oh well.

So to remove partition. Boot up from your XP/2003 CD/DVD, and then go into the Console Recovery mode. Login to your partition , then use “DISKPART” to open up the partition manager, and then simply remove the 55mb partition.

Done.

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Warning – Dell Inspiron 8500 Video BIOS Flash

So, a warning to all users of Dell Inspiron 8500 Laptops with the GeForce 4200 Go video card. Do not attempt to flash the bios on this video card using the Dell utility from their website. It doesnt work, and will brick your video card. When you download the utility, it appears to be nice and safe and made by nVidia. However, after you start it – it’ll tell you it’ll take a few seconds to flash. After minutes and even hours, that message won’t change. You have thus killed the bios on the video card. You can kill/close the fladhing program window, and still resume your windows activities but the system will not boot up again.

You have been warned

Update : Just looked at the download page again, it still says “Recommended”. I recommend you ignore this patch till they fix it. I’m talking to Dell support, and will update this entry with any information.

Update : Spoke to dell. They replaced the video card on the machine for free, and they will be investigating the bios update on the site that reads recommended. Thank you dell.