Once the Dell Utility 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 Dell Utility partition from the bios boot menu. The key combination to do this varies from one machine to the next. On this Dimension 4600, pressing F12 during POST (Power-On System Test) when the computer is turned on will bring up a bios boot menu, from which the user can select to boot the Utility Partition. If selected, the bios routine scans the partition table for a partition of type DEh. If found, it boots that partition, ignoring the active boot partition. If not found, it bails (no error message is displayed) and continues on to boot the active partition instead.

I have experimentally determined that the bios menu does not require the Utility partition to be the first partition on the disk, nor does it have to be the first partition listed in the partition table. (Aside: in case the reader doesn't know this, these are two different things--the order the partitions are listed in the partition table does not always have to correspond with the order of the physical partitions on the disk.) However, the Utility partition does have to be within the first 8GB of the disk in order for the Dell bios to be able to boot it. If the computer is equipped with a Dell PC Restore partition, that feature requires the Utility partition to be first. If returning the computer to its sealed state is a consideration, it's possible seal.exe might also impose the same restriction. So as a practical matter, keep the Utility partition first.

Having been replaced by seal.exe earlier, the new config.sys and autoexec.bat automatically launches delldiag.exe (the Dell diagnostic utility program), and automatically reboots the computer by calling dellboot.exe when delldiag.exe exits.