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.

Warning: If your computer is equipped with a Dell PC-Restore partition, that function expects to return the computer to a sealed state following a restore of the operating system. To avoid overwriting your custom config.sys and autoexec.bat files, you should edit the PC-Restore partition's autoexec.bat file so it skips that step.

Breaking Into the DE Partition

To add additional files you need access to the partition. First, use ptedit (don't forget to load a mouse driver) to change the partition-type to '06', and make it the active partition so it will be accessible as C:. You can't boot straight into C: yet because you have to first break the automatic delldiag-and-reboot cycle, so reboot from a DOS floppy. C: should be your now-visible utility partition. Rename c:\autoexec.bat to autoexec.old to keep it from automatically running. Now you can reboot from either floppy or from hard disk and have access to the partition without it automatically rebooting on you.

Add files and test everything. As long as the partition is active, the computer will boot the utility partition instead of the Windows partition, so take advantage of that by rebooting and testing how the partition works.

After adding files and making sure the partition operates like you want, use ptedit again to change the partition-type and active partition back to the way they were. Now you can run your own utilities from Dell's Utility partition.


I leave it to the reader to know enough DOS to customize the partition to your own liking. I'm not here to provide DOS support, but will offer a few ideas.

The first customization I recommend is upgrading the DOS version to MS-DOS 7.1, the version in Windows 98. This enables access to other FAT32 partitions from the utility partition, not just FAT16 partitions. This is done by booting from a Win98 boot floppy and using the command "sys c:". Also change any associated DOS files (himem.sys, emm386.exe, etc.) to the Win98 versions.

(Note to reader: a hard drive configuration I favor is to include a FAT32 partition at the end of the disk--or on a second disk--on which to store backup images of the main Windows partition. If running from a DOS-7.1 utility partition, the DOS versions of DriveImage or Ghost can access this partition.)

I create a DOS menu similar to that shown here. This particular menu utilizes the DOS ansi.sys driver (loaded via config.sys) to manipulate screen colors, and DOS's choice.com to wait for a keypress to act on. Type "choice /?" for help with the choice command (well, a little help, anyway). Ansi.sys recognizes special "escape sequences" embedded in the menu batch file to specify screen characteristics like text and background color.

Note the original Dell Diagnostics utility hasn't been dumped--it's included on the custom menu. Returning from delldiag.exe returns to the menu instead of automatically rebooting.


If it's of any help, I've made available some of the DOS files I use. Download custom.zip (1.9 MB--with Internet Explorer, right-click the link and choose "Save Target As..."). Extract custom.exe from the zipfile, place it in the root directory of your utility partition, and run it from the DOS command line to extract the directories and files. If you'd rather see what's in it first, place it in a temporary directory and run it to extract the directories and files into the temporary directory, then move them to the root directory.

(Note to reader: Why is custom.exe a self-extracting archive file? Because it's the easiest way to recreate the directory structure along with the extracted files. So, why re-zip custom.exe into custom.zip? Because nearly everyone can download zipfiles, but some people may have trouble directly downloading an executable file like custom.exe because of security settings on their Internet connection.)

Feel free to customize the menu to your own liking and add your own utilities.




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