Dell Prebuilt PC - Does wiping the recovery partition invalidates the warranty?

[Fennie]

Hi there,

I've recently brought a prebuilt PC from Dell (Vostro 410 model) but it came with so much bloat ware and a 10gb partition for the recovery data. It also came with Vista basic preinstalled but I'm looking to upgrade the OS to Vista Ultimate but want to clean out the PC completely before doing so but will this invalidate my warranty with Dell in the event of a hardware problem?

[Pob255]

No it will not, however if for any reason they have to do any major repairs (off hand motherboard fault or hard drive fault or often more probable a windows failier) then they will wipe your hard drive and re-image it (ie an exact copy of how it first arrived)
One thing to check is that dell's often have a hardware test on a partition on the hard disk, you access it from the BIOS/key press at boot up, as much as they bloat windows that hardware test is very nice and you'll probably be asked to run it if any thing fails (good idea to do it before calling) it might be part of that 10gb partition or it might not.

[Maccer101]

I think the 10gb Partition is just the rescue, there should be an even smaller partition before that which is the diagnostics. They do also give you a diagnostics disk for thorough testing.

[Gfinch]

I have a dell and I also have the 10GB partition. I went into Disk Management and I appeared to have 3 Partitions, so I believe the 3rd one is Dell Diagnostics tool. I formatted my 10GB, but I am yet to check if I can run the Dell Diagnostics tool.

[Breezey]

Diagnostic tool or no diagnostic tool i formatted my XPS 5 minutes after i got it out of the box it was dog slow with bloatware.

[peterb]

Or you could buy a new hard drive and install that in place of the one supplied and install whatever operating sytem you like on it - and still have the original to revert to if you need it.