Well this is coming from a FAT-free Windows XP machine. (I'd never focused before on how healthy it is.) And I am in the process of trying to rescue data from a friend's disk which ran Vista and was also FAT-free.
I think there may be some confusion with the Master Boor Record (MBR) on the hard disk which is read when booting up. The MBR ain't a partition though; is much smaller; and won't show up in My Computer. (For more details please Google or ask someone who knows more than me- there are several here.)
No matter how good a friend s/he is, perhaps *not* someone to let free to (try to) fix your PC :)
From memory (mine, not the computer's!), the BIOS loads* the first 512 bytes from the start of the hard disk into the machine's memory and excutes the code that it finds there; it knows nothing of what the filesystem format is. The code that it loads and executes is responsible for booting the actual OS (and loading whatever drivers to access the rest of the disk are necessary, whether it be FAT or NTFS or any of the other hundreds of filesystem formats that have existed over the years)
broadly-speaking; it's a little bit more complex than that, because the code to access the boot device isn't necessarily part of the motherboard's BIOS itself (and may live on a SCSI controller, network board etc.)
Many thanks, Robin. I take it then that this suggestion from 'a friend' is incorrect "All NTFS formatted drives still require to have a FAT 16/32 partition (or 2) to facilitate boot-up. Bios's can't read NTFS because it is requires the OS (Windows or otherwise) to be loaded first. " ??
Rob
I hope all this technical digression hasn't put the OP off the simple task of unplugging one cd drive and plugging in another...
However, this partition talk should include the point that should the reader wish to upgrade his *hard* drive to a larger capacity one, then the standard imaging tools like Acronis, if left in basic setting, create partitions on the new drive in proportion to those on the original, so your new diagnostics partition will end up much bigger than it was. As new drives tend to be vast compared with old ones, the extra space is still insignificant but you can make adjustments if you wish. The standard disc management console in XP does not have partition sizing functionality, but there is a very useful prog - Easeus - that you can download a free version of:
formatting link
It's a nice tool, and a shame one doesn't need to use it very often.
Also there are various reserved areas that get enlarged as well: not a problem, but irritating to see when you are using a defrag programme. JKDefrag is a handy free defragmenter that can be run in various optimisation modes, to maximize the empty 'black' space on your drive. This may seem trivial with the size of drives now, but if you are doing things like editing videos that may come to hundreds of megs, things are quicker if this is available as big blocks rather than spread about all over the place.
If you are using cable select, and have the right cable, the position dictates which is master (black connector) verses slave (grey) (blue to Mobo). However you can override that with the jumpers. If only using a single drive, then its better on the end connector to ensure the bus is terminated for the reasons you state.
Yup probably Dell utils (use as a boot option), and the recovery partition. If you want, you could reclaim this space with something like Partition Magic or a freeware equivalent. Whether its worth it for ~3GB is debatable.
I don't think it ever was in date, even NT3.1 would boot from a single NTFS partition (or on an ALPHA that didn't have BIOS or run any O/S that used FAT16/32)
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