Disclaimer: I am not associated with Dell Computer Corp. in any way, except as an end user. The information presented here does not represent official information from Dell or Dell representatives. This is just some conclusions from my personal exploration of the utility partition on several Dell desktops and laptops. This information is provided as-is, so interested others may look over my shoulder at what I've found with this particular machine. Though it may apply generally to many new Dell computers, the reader should take that into consideration.

Recent Dell computers come with a hidden Dell Utility partition at the front of the disk. By pressing the right keys while the computer is starting up, the bios startup procedure will pause and display a boot menu from which the user can choose to boot this utility partition instead of the normal Windows partition.

The Dell Utility partition exists in one of two states. It's convenient to think of these two states like opening a factory-fresh package in which the package is initially sealed, and then you break the seal and open the package.

A new computer arrives from Dell in the 'sealed' state. When the computer is booted from the hard disk for the very first time, the user must acknowledge the Dell End-User License Agreement (EULA), is prompted to record the Dell Service Tag for future reference, and then the computer is allowed to boot into Windows. Once the seal is broken (that is, the computer has booted at least once), this first-time procedure is not repeated. After the computer has booted once in the sealed state, it changes itself to the 'unsealed' state. The Dell Utility partition becomes dormant and does not boot again unless the user deliberately launches it from the bios boot menu. Otherwise, the computer boots directly into Windows.

Partition Parameters
The Dell Utility partition is really an ordinary FAT16 partition, but the partition-type indicator in the partition table has been changed to 'DE'. For brevity, I'll henceforth refer to this as the DE partition. This section describes in more detail the parameters of this partition.

Sealed State
In its sealed state, the DE partition is marked as the 'active' partition in the partition table. Thus, the first time the computer boots from the hard disk it will boot the DE partition, not the Windows partition. This section describes this one-time-only scenario.

Unsealed State
Once the DE partition has changed into its unsealed state, it is no longer the active partition. The computer will boot directly into Windows unless the user deliberately chooses to boot the DE partition from the bios boot menu. In that case, the Dell Diagnostic program, delldiag.exe, is automatically run from the DE partition. This section describes this process in more detail.

Appendix: Recreating the Dell Utility Partition
You may wish to recreate the DE partition if the hard disk is upgraded or replaced. For the record, installing delldiag on the hard disk is optional. It's the same program you can run from the Dell Resource CD (if one came with your computer, and if you can still find it). Many people are satisfied to just run the diagnostic utility from CD when necessary, but this section describes how to recreate the DE partition on the hard disk if you choose to do so.

Appendix: Customizing the Dell Utility Partition
The typical DE partition, as created by Dell, is about 30-60 MB large with about 10 MB of files. This means there is some extra room to add a few customizations of your own. You can even make a larger DE partition if you want more room than 60 MB. Instead of the usual cycle of booting straight into delldiag and then rebooting, you can use a simple menu to choose which utilities to run, and return to your menu instead of rebooting. This section explains how to do this.

Appendix: The Dell PC Restore Partition
(Note to reader: this is separate from, and unrelated to the Utility partition.)