"piook" <piook@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:E486890C-416D-4EE8-9301-15851A4084B7@microsoft.com...
> My guess is that your D drive is a recovery drive for going back to the
> original "Factory Settings" on your computer. So it is not intended as a
> place to store your Vista Backups. Furthermore, it is probably just a
> partition of the only "physical" hard drive in your machine (the same
> physical drive as your C: partition) and as such is not a good place for
> storing the backups anyway, since if that hard drive fails the back up
> will
> be lost.
>
> You should also read the documentation for the machine to see if you need
> to
> make a restore disk in case of a hard drive failure, since often times the
> d:
> partition is used in place of computer manufacturer's sending an
> install/recovery disc with your system.
> --
> piook is a long standing psuedo-name that resulted from a typo on the old
> computer game "Where in the USA IS Carmen Sandiego", and it stuck.
>
>
I'm going to confirm your guess, Piook.
This is the recovery drive to do a system restore to factory new.
IT SHOULD NOT BE DELETED, FORMATTED, OR MESSED WITH IN ANY WAY! Unless of
course you have full install disks for all the software that came with your
system. :-)
Dell will provide complete disks, but they usually expect you to pay for
them, so make the recovery disks that it should be bugging you to make and
leave the D: drive alone.
In the past Dell always marked this drive as hidden but for some reason on
the Vista pre-loads they haven't.
Mic