Seems everyone is going the same route. My HP came with a System Recovery partition. The disk you got from Dell will NOT have any 3rd party software on it, such as CD burner, imaging, games, etc. All the extras are in the Recovery partition only. You should have a Recovery CD maker program that will allow you to burn a set of recovery disk. Took me about 2 hours and 10 disk. On my HP, the program included a tool disk maker. The tool disk allows you to delete the data in the Recovery partition after you have made the recovery disk. This leaves you with a empty partition with about 4-6 Gigs of free hard drive space. It also lets you make a partition. You must have unallocated space on your Basic disk to make a new partition. You can have 4 primary partitions on a Basic disk or 3 primarys and a extended partition. You can make a unlimited # of logical drives in the extended partition, each logical drive can be formatted and given a drive letter. If you don't have any unallocated space, you can download a 3rd party program to resize existing partitions.
http://www.globalshareware.com/Utilities/S...Expert-2003.htm
In XP go to Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management, click on Help / Help Topics / Index and look for Partitions and Volumes.
This will tell you how to setup a new partition. That's where I got most of this information.
Hope you didn't think I was smart enough to come up with this on my own. LOL