Useful Guidelines To Remove/Delete EISA Hidden Recovery Partition In Windows Vista
OEM companies such as HP, Dell, IBM/Lenovo, Acer, Sony, ASUS, Toshiba, Fujitsu and many others manufacture notebook PCs, laptops and desktop computers which feature a EISA partition either into NTFS or FAT file system that normally comes with a system recovery utility. This utility helps you rollback your PC to factory conditions if the system fails or gets corrupt.
This special EISA partition consumes a disk space of about 10 GB and is usually hidden. Generally, IBM/Lenovo OEM systems do not allow you to delete this partition from within Windows. Many of the EISA hidden partitions are not assigned with a drive letter. Deleting them using any disk management tools from the Control Panel is also not possible.
You cannot even merge the EISA partition with any of the existing partitions. Moreover, advanced third-party applications such as Partition Magic and Acronis Disk Director are also unable to change, manipulate or delete the partition.
The EISA partition is normally locked and protected so as to avoid any accidental deletion of its system recovery utility which helps in restoring and reinstalling the system with the necessary drivers and applications incase of any failure. EISA partition contains a recovery procedure which can be accessed and activated by pressing a single key during boot up.
You can create up to a few gigabytes of free space on your hard disk if you manage to get rid of this recovery partition. Though, deleting the special diagnostic partition within Windows operating system is almost impossible, various tips on the internet suggest a removal process using DOS environment.
Users are however advised to check for any guide or procedure provided by the OEM for deletion or removal of the partition. Some OEM companies including HP and Lenovo/IBM are known to provide procedure manuals for this purpose.
Incase you are Windows Vista user and unable to find any guideline provided by OEM, you can use the advanced Diskpart for removal of the partition. Diskpart is basically a text-mode command interpreter which helps you manage partition, volume and hard disk in Vista. (Free Downloads are also available for Windows 2000, 2003 and XP users)
Below mentioned is the process to be followed so as to remove/delete the EISA Recovery partition in Vista. You need to create Recovery Discs before you start with the deletion procedure or else you might not be able to reinstall your PC to default factory condition on any system failure.
Go to command prompt with administrator rights.
Type Diskpart at the command prompt to run Diskpart application.
Within “Diskpart” prompt, type “rescan” and hit the Enter key. This will re-scan all the volumes, drives and partitions available.
Now, type “list disk”. Press Enter to check all the hard disk drives available.
Choose the disk containing the recovery partition. If only one hard disk is present which is disk 0 (Zero), you need to type the command “select disk 0” and hit the enter key to finish.
Further, type the command “list partition”. Press Enter to view all available as well as created partitions in the selected disk.
Now, you need to choose the partition that you wish to delete by typing the command “select partition x”. Press Enter again.
“x” in the above command has to be replaced by the EISA recovery partition number. You need to be very careful while entering the partition number or you might end up wiping off some useful data.
Finally, you need to type “delete partition override”. Press Enter to finish the process.
Now, when you have deleted the partition, exit from Diskpart. You can now make use of Disk Management tool to either create a new partition using the free space or merge it with any of the existing partitions.