Re:Ask HN: Dell paved my hard drive with Windows, now what?
by brudgers on Monday June 15, 2015 @10:52PM
(#9723538)
On my Dell's, the diagnostics have been a partition on the hard drive, which while in hardware, should not be considered 'baked in' in any important sense. If a user has formatted over that partition when installing another OS, then those diagnostics cease to be available [which was how I came by my intimate knowledge]. Fortunately, the box has never required service beyond BIOS upgrades which can be user installed.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Dell paved my hard drive with Windows, now what?
by yellowapple on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @01:59PM
(#9727606)
That's interesting, to say the least. I thought they stopped doing that quite a while ago now that UEFI is becoming the norm?
I used to manage a wide deployment of Dell workstations across multiple locations in a small hospital district. We had a Windows 7 image that we'd deploy (nuking all the partitions in the process, including any Dell recovery partitions), yet diagnostics would continue to be available for those times when we encountered hardware issues and needed to send machines back to Dell (and I'm pretty confident that we didn't preserve any diagnostic partition(s) during the imaging process).
I suppose older machines probably required a diagnostic partition, in which case I stand corrected.