for information on recreating the diagnostics partition, see the section
of the FAQ that deals with the diagnostics softpack from COMPAQ.

[Q] Does anyone have any information on the little (2mb) partition which the
Aero boots from if you hold down the 'F10' key to run setup during boot? Is
there a FAT filesystem hidden there somewhere?

[A] The machine actually comes with two DOS partitions: the main one that you
see, and a tiny (2M) one which runs the setup utilities. You almost certainly
want to keep the latter around forever. As for the main DOS partition, it
contains lots of otherwise unavailable documentation about how your machine
works, and some setup utilities that do things that the setup partition can't
do.

In particular, the utility to control whether the PCMCIA slot remains powered
during suspend seems only to be available in Windows, and at least a few of us
configured our machine to leave power on in the slot and are now regretting
that choice (because it uses up power during suspend).

[A] it has DOS 6.2 on it, and it has
config.sys/autoexec.bat files that run the setup program for the aero. You
install it by using the setup program, which you can transfer onto a 1.44MB
disk if you have the PCMCIA floppy drive. That's what I've done, seeing as I
don't run DOS or Windows but would like to be able to setup my machine without
a 2MB partition sitting on my drive doing nothing 99.99% of the time ...