I am using Macrium free to image my laptop and it shows three partitions 1) DellUtility in 16-bit Fat 2) Recovery Ntfs Active 3) OS Ntfs Primary Recovery and OS (ie 2 and 3) are ticked by default. What is the purpose of the Dell Utility and can I leave this unticked? I don't intend to make any special changes, just would like to have a backup image in case something goes wrong on the laptop.
The purpose of the Dell Utillity partition is to run the Dell hardware diagnostics from the boot menu (enabled when F12 is pressed at boot) or from the firmware setup (F2). If this partition doesn´t exist, you can´t run these diagnostics. As it´s small, it´s no problem to include it in the backups.
beethoven, The first two partitions don't change so you only have to image them once. The second partition contains the booting files so it is the System partition. As you are creating your own OS backups you don't really need that partition but you do need the contained booting files. I copy the booting files to the OS partition and then delete the Recovery partition. As you have an image you can always restore the partition but I doubt this would ever be necessary. http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=409
thank you Robin and Brian - I read through the terabyte article and if necessary should be able to follow these instructions. On the other hand, if I understand you correctly Brian, copying the booting files and then deleting the recovery partition will "tidy" up things but is not really necessary. If I fully image (either with or without the Dell utility) I should always be able to recover to my previous system, right?
That is correct. After imaging the first two partitions once, you only need to image the OS partition thereafter. If your HD fails your images will allow you to restore to a new HD. Bare Metal.