Unsealed State
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.
Having been replaced by seal.exe earlier, the new config.sys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.
Warning:
Although the DellUtility partition does not need to be the first partition for it to
function, there are practical reasons for keeping it in the first position.
If the computer is equipped with a Dell PC-Restore
partition, that feature requires the DellUtility 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.
Also, version upgrades to the Dell Diagnostics utility are sometimes available
for particular models. These upgrades may be supplied in a variety of formats, with
one format (since perhaps 2007?) being a 32-bit executable that runs from Windows to
update the DellUtility partition. A user has reported that these Windows versions
seem to require that the DellUtility partition be first or the update will not proceed.
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