My new Dell Optiplex 745 came with Windows Vista, and it has some weird Dell-specific partitions. Windows Vista has its own built-in imaging application, like Disk Utility on Mac OS X. Vista’s is called ImageX. Its functionality is similar to 3rd party Windows-based imagers such as Symantec Ghost, Acronis True Image, DriveImage XML (freeware), and others. It’s available from the Vista Recovery Environment, which you can access by pressing F8 as soon as Windows begins to boot. Dell has taken advantage of this option; instead of providing a factory Ghost image on a proprietary DSR partition, as they did with Windows XP and earlier, the image is now in ImageX format and can be restored from the Vista Recovery Environment.

Dell’s Vista systems ship with the following partition layout:

1. A small DellUtility partition, as before, and still disguised as type ‘DE’;
2. A NTFS partition (type ‘07′) of about 10 GB, which is used by the Recovery Environment and holds the Dell backup image;
3. The main NTFS partition (type ‘07′), which contains the Vista operating system and occupies the bulk of the disk space.
4. If the system includes MediaDirect 3, there is a fourth partition at the end of the disk. This is an extended partition (type ‘0F’) of 2 GB. An extended partition is a container for one or more logical volumes (sometimes referred to as “logical partitions” or, incorrectly, as multiple “extended partitions”). In Dell’s MediaDirect 3 configuration, the extended partition contains a single logical volume occupying the full 2 GB. This logical volume contains the MediaDirect 3 operating system. The “partition type” flag for this volume in the extended partition table is–in the now familiar Dell fashion–disguised as type ‘DD’.