Dell Utility Partition 2

[marvhuffaker]

Is the Dell Utility Partition necessary? I want to blow it away if I don't need it. Is it required to access the BIOS settings?

Marvin Huffaker, MCNE

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[TheLad]

I think if the Utility partition is not installed, you get an error to that effect and need to press F1 to get rid of the error on bootup (as per this TID:

http://support.dell.com/support/top...ment?dn=1011514&l=en&langid=1&c=us&cs=&s=gen)

But as this TID states:

http://support.dell.com/support/top...ument?dn=1011143&l=en&langid=1&c=us&cs=&s=gen

You can boot off a CD or boot disk if you need to access the utilities

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[LawnBoy]

I don't have that partition on any of my 2650's or 2850's and they don't have issues. I never take a factory loadout into production. I fdisk when they come out of the cardboard.

 

[marvhuffaker]

Thanks. I think I'll bite the bullet and blow it away.

I don't do much with dell servers. But I added a drive to a RAID 5 array the other day.. And I expected it to create another Logical Drive (or Virtual Drive in Dell terms). But instead, it just increased the size of the original virtual drive. And it already has 4 partitions on it, so I cna't add another one.

On HP/compaq systems it would have created a whole new Logical drive, so I could have easily avoided the 4 partition limit. Removing the Utility partition will allow me to allocate the additional drive space as an NSS partition. I know I could expand the partition with Portlock, but that's an added expense my client doesn't want at this point.

Is there something I am missing?

Marvin

 

[LawnBoy]

I'm no RAID 5 expert, but I would have expected the results you got. I've always done 1 array = 1 logical drive, 2 arrays = 2 logical drives, etc.