many partitions

[fnction22]

Greatings and well wishes ,

I recently bought a dell laptop which alledgedly came with 30gb ,the computer only reads 24.4gb .I downloaded everest and found out that there are two other partitions (dell utility ,unknown (code $db) )including the the partition that seems to have most of my disk space .
Question : can i safely delete them and formatt to regain the rest of my disk space ??
Many preliminary thanks !!!!

[El Clammino]

Greatings and well wishes ,

I recently bought a dell laptop which alledgedly came with 30gb ,the computer only reads 24.4gb .I downloaded everest and found out that there are two other partitions (dell utility ,unknown (code $db) )including the the partition that seems to have most of my disk space .
Question : can i safely delete them and formatt to regain the rest of my disk space ??
Many preliminary thanks !!!!

In short, NO. A 30GB Hdd is going to show about 28GB, before you put an OS and any apps on it. Windows XP and Office is about 3 gigs, then add any of the Dell software and other apps on the drive.

The other two partitions, 1 is the factory restore partition (dell utility), which is used in case your OS gets damaged and you need to reinstall it. The restore partition will bring your OS back to the 'out of the box' state. The second partition is probably very small and needs to be there. Do Not delete it. If you wipe out the whole drive and reformat you will still have the bit of unallocated space.

I do not recommend deleting the Dell Utility partition, you may end up needing it.

[3fingersalute]

If you have your own OS you are loading and have all drivers and apps you need, you could wipe all partitions and create one large partition, but as mentioned above, it is still not going to show as 30GB.

If you are a user or a novice, I would keep the Dell partitions on there, they are made to make the restore procedure as simple as possible for end users.