Is it safe to use unallocated space /delete hidden partitions?

[Volkmar]

Hi there!

I have a 3 years old Dell PC and just re-installed XP as the PC became slower over time. So far everything works fine. I have installed Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 and attached is a snapshot of my current setup:

I have 3 physical disks (No.1 and 2 are internal drives, No. 3 is a external USB drive). Disk 1 and 3 both show an area of unallocated space (interestingly enough each of them is 7,844 MB large). I have no clue what they are for. As they are exactly of the same size, I assume some 'administrative' purpose?

Question 1: Is it safe to use this space (e.g. by increasing the partitions next to them)?

On disc 1 are also two primary partitions without a drive label. One is FAT16 the other is FAT32. Again I don't know what they are for.
Maybe Dell hid some programs/utilities, If so, I'm not interested in them.

Question 2: Is it safe to delete these partitions?

Any advice on this would be very much appreciated. Hope this is not too off topic...

Merry Christmas
Volkmar

[MudCrab]

-{ Quote: "Disk 1 and 3 both show an area of unallocated space (interestingly enough each of them is 7,844 MB large). I have no clue what they are for. As they are exactly of the same size, I assume some 'administrative' purpose?" }-
That unallocated space is normal. You won't be able to use it on the external because it preceeds a Logical partition. On the other drive, you could probably use it. However, the space is so small it's not really worth any extra trouble.

-{ Quote: "On disc 1 are also two primary partitions without a drive label. One is FAT16 the other is FAT32. Again I don't know what they are for.
Maybe Dell hid some programs/utilities, If so, I'm not interested in them." }-
You can probably remove them and be okay since the XP partition is the Active (booting) partition.

I strongly recommend you create an Entire Disk Image backup of the drive prior to doing any partitioning changes.

[Volkmar]

Thanks for the quick reply!
Volkmar

[crofttk]

Yeah, that first partition on Disk 1 is LIKELY the Dell diagnostics partition. If that has no value to you AND if you don't rely on Dell for tech support then you don't miss much blowing it away BUT I would definitely take the precautions MudCrab recommended before doing so.

It looks like you've already gotten rid of the Dell system recovery partition - I have mine imaged to an external USB drive and then recovered the space for my laptop.

If I recall correctly, you may not recover the little space on the front of Disk 3 unless you make one of the partitions a primary and there may be a trick to get the last small bit on Disk 1 but, as MudCrab said, it's hardly worth the trouble.

Frohliche Weinacthen!

[Volkmar]

Thanks again!
Merry Xmas to you as well ;-)

Volkmar

[Brian K]

Volkmar,

After you deleted the Dell Diagnostic partition did you experience a boot.ini issue with WinXP? Just interested.

Edit: I just noticed in your other thread that you didn't have a problem with boot.ini. I did and had to edit partition(2) to partition(1).

[Volkmar]

Brian,

well when I deleted the unlabeled partition at the end of disk 1 the first time, the entire disk would diasappear so I Un-did this.
So then I deleted the unlabeled partition at the beginning of disk 1 and confirmed everything was ok. Then I deleted the other unlabeled one again and now it would do the trick without problems (and after that I also could recover the unallocated space at the end).

Volkmar

[rkh]

I just assumed these tiny partitions were the result of a bug in DD. I never had them till I used DD to create partitions - and when I created my partitions, I certainly didn't choose to leave any unallocated space.