>After waiting a couple of hours to get through to Dell's support, he
>was given the advice to use his rescue-floppy which would "erase the
>harddrive" (don't really know what he meant by this, perhaps reformat
>the partition?) and then reinstall to the state it had when it left
>the factory. To do this, the floppy gave access to a special
>partition, Z, on the HD, which obviously contained the information
>which was in the first partition when the computer was shipped. You
>had to use the password "ZZ-Top" (!) to access it...
Hmmm... Well, as I'm typing on a Dell machine right now (Dimension XPS R400,
Maxtor 10Gb HDD) I can tell you that's wrong... There's no hidden partition -
the entire drive is one FAT32 partition. There is a file in the root called
'ZZ-TOP.EXE' with hidden attributes, also a 'Z.BAT' that would presumable be
run if the user enters Z at the DOS prompt - this just calls ZZ-TOP. I've not
run this program yet, in case it does something nasty - however, I've read
through it and it contains menus with options such as Reinitialise HDD to
factory state', 'Re-seal EBS' - EBS being Electronic Break The Seal.
Regards, Home page: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/8786
Ben A L Jemmett ICQ: 9848866 JGSD e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Display Partition Information
Current fixed disk drive: 1
Partition Status Type Volume Label Mbytes System Usage
C: 1 A PRI DOS TOO LOUD!!! 9539 FAT32 100%
Total disk space is 9539 Mbytes (1 Mbyte = 1048576 bytes)
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