Vista EISA Configuration?

[torvalds]

I just got a new Acer laptop which had two partitions, C and D visible in My Computer, also in Disk Management there was another 9.77GB EISA Configuration partition.

I wanted to split D in half and managed to do it with Paragon Partition Manager. It was ok until I rebooted. Now im back to a C and a D drive in My Computer only now I have 113Gb missing.

Going back into Disk Management I see that the 113Gb is now also an EISA Configuration partition.

No matter what I do the 113GB will always change back to the EISA Configuration after rebooting.

I have really, really tried to look at this in a logical way but have given up as it makes no sense to me at all.

 

[darkpaw]

The EISA partition is for the shitty ass system restore/diagnostics partition the OEMS put in place instead of shipping a real Windows disk. I'm not familiar with partition manager so I can't comment on that, but it sounds like it messed up on reallocating the space.

Is there a reason why you didn't use the Vista tools to shrink the D partition and create a new one?

 

[MChief]

The reason the partition type is changing is your manufacturer installs a boot manager in the 64 sector reserved area of the disk. Here's what happens:

The MBR (first 512 bytes of your disk) is run by the BIOS. This is normally MS code that just looks for the active partition and runs it's first 512 bytes, the boot sector.

Instead, your laptop manufacturer has it's own MBR code, which points to their recovery program hidden in the 64 sector reserved area. This program does a few checks to see if everything is OK, and one of those checks is the partition type for the recovery partition. It does this by enumerating the partitions and is quite dumb, it just says "Make partition #3 type 0x(whatever it is.)"

So because you made a new partition #3, the dumb boot program is changing it to EISA type. You could actually edit the MBR and change the real recovery partition to 0x07 and access it, it's just an NTFS filesystem.

If you want to keep the recovery options intact, remove the 113GB partition, make a tiny dummy partition that will be wasted space as small as you can make it, then make a normal large disk after it. You might need to make an extended partition and put logical drives in it, depending on how you want to divide up your data.

They probably included programs to make backup DVD's of all the drivers and recovery options. Make sure you burn those in case you get into trouble. I would make the DVD backups and wipe the MBR program by running the vista boot recovery program from a vanilla vista DVD, or installing GRUB, and delete all the recovery partitions.

Keep in mind if you do anything related to partitioning you might have trouble getting warranty support, and you should know what you're doing before monkeying with MBR's.