See here:

http://radified.com/blog/archives/000141.html

It takes up a primaty partition, which is no problem if you use Ghost 2003 with a DOS boot floppy, but can prevent you from using the Windows interface with Ghost 2003 .. depending how you partition the drive, cuz an exttended partition counts as a primary.

Not sure about Ghost 9/10. I'd guess no problem there.

I believe the Dell utility is based on Ghost (not sure). I heard it was made by Symantec.

You got a letter from Dell's lawyers? That means they consider your site has clout? I'm proud of you. I've gotten my fair fair of unfriendly "notices" from lawyers, altho not from Dell's.

What did it say? .. if I can ask.

legal-misery loves company.  

Dan Goodell

Sounds like Dell has it *half-ass backwards*!  The lawyers should have been offering you a contract to handsomely pay you for the rights to use your intellectual property to fix their product.

God--they (corporations) waste their money in all the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons.

No, not really.  It's become very popular.  Even though the site has only existed for 6 months,  it's getting over 8,000 visits monthly.  On Dell's own "Community Forums" website, the regulars have been routinely referring users to my site for months.  For awhile now, I've figured Dell reps were aware of it.

What has surprised me, though, is that Dell is still telling users there is no way to repair the DSR if they've lost access to it, even though the partition may still be intact on the hard disk.  You'd think that someone at Dell would look at my site and say, "Jeez, why didn't we think of that?  We could be doing this ourselves."  After all, I had laid out all the details for them on a silver platter. 

I appreciate the feedback, Malcolm.  Thanks!

I can't answer your Ghost 10 question, as I don't use it.  But I'm sure that would be covered in the EULA, wouldn't it?

Yes, if you want to be able to restore to the "as-shipped" Windows configuration at some time in the future.

For example, let's say you split your "one-giant-C-partition" into a smaller C plus a new D partition.  In this scenario, you would use something like PartitionMagic to do the repartitioning, then run dsrfix to repair DSR and keep it functional.  Then at a later date you would have the ability to restore your C partition back to its "as-shipped" without undoing your repartitioning.  DSR does not restore the original partition structure, it merely restores the software back to the state it was in when you first got the machine, albeit as a smaller partition.

Of course, if you have your own copy of Ghost, then presumably you're going to be making regular Ghost backups, which would minimize the value of the Dell restore partition altogether.  DSR is of the most value to Dell customers who don't have Ghost or a similar tool.

As near as I can tell, fi.gho seems to be in ordinary Ghost 2003 format.  Anything that can read v2003 images should be able read the fi.gho image.  I regularly use Ghost 2003 from DOS to both read and write updated fi.gho images.  (I do this for friends and clients--configuring a new system with their own programs, mail settings, etc., then creating a fresh fi.gho image that they can restore to via Dell's PC-Restore technique.)



That's very easily done.  Temporarily expose the hidden Dell partition and manipulate the image file just like any other file.

If you happen to have a PartitionMagic CD, buried on it are two utilities, ptedit.exe (for DOS) and ptedit32.exe (for NT/2K/XP).  If you don't have PM, my website has a link to download ptedit (but not ptedit32) from Symantec's ftp site.

Run ptedit32, or boot to real DOS and run ptedit.  Change the partition type of the third partition from 'DB' to '0C'.  This will expose the third partition to Windows, so when you reboot into Windows that partition will be assigned a new drive letter. 

Now that you have access, simply drag the files from the \img directory to whereever you want to copy them.  These files will include fi.gho plus one or more fi00000?.ghs files.  Note that they are too big to fit on CD, but they should all fit on a DVD.

Also copy the \bin\recover.exe file and the mouse driver.  Put them on the same DVD.  Recover.exe is a crippled variation of Ghost 2003, so can be used to restore fi.gho if you don't happen to have Ghost 2003. 

When you need to restore, simply boot from a DOS boot disk, switch to the CD/DVD drive letter, load the mouse driver, and launch recover.exe.  From here, you'll manually direct recover.exe through the restore process, exactly as you would in Ghost 2003.  (In contrast, while within Dell's DSR environment recover.exe is scripted through a batch file to restore without manual intervention.)