If you have installed and configured a Dell Poweredge Server, you may have noticed a "utility" partition which exists on the system drive....in our our case on the RAID 1 mirror which is our system drive.
For reasons I wont go into, it was suggested that we remove the dell system partition. The Server is a 2008 build, where the partition simply shows up in Storage Management, but you are unable to edit or delete it from there.
Dell's solution was to rebuild the entire server including OS. Great....
I decided there must be a quicker way so had a little expriment with DISKPART. Diskpart is a command line tool which allows you to foricbly remove a partition. As long as you are not trying to force remove a partition within a dynamic disk, this is a fairly straight forward process and is supposed to leave the rest of the drive (or mirror) in tact.
To cut a long store short....dont use DISKPART to force remove a DELL utility partition, it doesnt work, and it will leave you having to rebuild all the data contained on the same drive. Considering the Dell Utility Partition only contains data which is on a normal Dell boot CD, I really cant see the point in it.
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After spending 2 days configuring a client's server this past week I found out the Windows Server backup utility couldn't make a system state backup. Now I didn't do the actual OS staging this time around so I can't be 100% but it looks like Windows 2008 (R2) 'saw' the utility partition during installation and installed some of it's own boot files into the utility partition (there is no 300MB hidden system partition for the OS like normal). This may be because the out of box first run was never completed on the dell utility which would have marked it as hidden and inactive once completed (this is the key). Summary: on first power up, complete the dell first run wizard, then boot off the Dell OS installation DVD and follow the prompts to install 2008 and above (or erase the disk prior to OS installation).
PS - this utility partition contains the same tools found on the bootable diagnostic CD, it is put on the hard drive to make it more convenient to access when needed (no CD's needed, faster to load, etc), but is not needed for normal operation. It is up to your own preferences whether to keep it or not.
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