Delete and Remove to Unlock EISA Hidden Recovery or Diagnostic Partition in Vista
All OEM computers, desktop or notebook PCs from Dell, HP, Lenovo, IBM, Acer, ASUS, Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba and many more probably comes with special EISA partition either in FAT or NTFS file system that contains system recovery utility to rollback to factory settings and/or diagnostic tools. The special partition, normally hidden, can have a size of from few gigabytes to 10 GB or more. In some OEM system, such as those from IBM/Lenovo, is impossible to delete from within Windows.
Some EISA hidden special partition doesn’t even have drive letter assigned, nor can be deleted by using Disk Management snap-in of computer Management in Control Panel Administrator Tool. The partition cannot be merged into any other existing partition either. Some users reported that even advanced third-party disk management tool such as Acronis Disk Director Suite and Partition Magic cannot manipulate, change, remove and delete the partition either under Windows desktop.
The special recovery partition is protected and locked to secure and avoid accidental deletion of the recovery partition, which is important when to recover and reinstall operating with needed drivers and software application when system corrupts or fails. Some recovery procedure which installed in the EISA partition can be activated with just one key press, or access during boot up.
Some users may not want this special recovery partition, which can possibly free up a few GBs of hard disk storage space. As mentioned, it’s possibly almost impossible to delete this special recovery or diagnostic partition under Windows operating system. Some tips provided on the net recommend users to do removal process under DOS environment, or from another operating system on dual boot or multiple boot system.
However, it’s recommended that users check with manufacturer first if the OEM provides any removal and deletion procedure or guide, such as those provided by Lenovo/IBM and HP. If none is found, it’s possible to remove the recovery partition from Windows Vista, by using advanced Diskpart, a text-mode command line interpreter based on scripts that manages hard disk, partition and volume in Vista (also available for free download for XP, 2000, and 2003).
Here’s the trick to delete and remove the EISA recovery or diagnostic partition in Vista. Before proceeding with the deletion action, make sure that at least a set of Recovery Disc Media has been created. Else, you won’t be able to restore your computer to working and factory default condition when any problem on PC requires reinstallation.
- Open a command prompt as administrator.
- Run Diskpart application by typing Diskpart in the command prompt.
- In the “Diskpart” prompt, enter rescan command and press Enter key to re-scan all partitions, volumes and drives available.
- Then type in list disk and press Enter key to show all hard disk drive available.
- Select the disk that contains the partition you want to remove. Normally, with just 1 hard disk, it will be disk 0. So the command will be:
select disk 0
Finish by Enter key.
- Type list partition and press Enter key to show all available and created partition in the disk selected.
- Select the partition that wanted to be deleted by using the following command, followed by Enter key:
select partition x
where x is the number of the EISA based recovery partition to be removed and unlocked its space. Be careful with the number of this partition, as wrong number may get data wipes off.
- Finally, type in delete partition override and press Enter key.
Once the partition has been deleted, exit from Diskpart, and now users can use the much familiar and much easier Disk Management tool in Windows (diskmgmt.msc) to manipulate the freed unallocated partition. Users can create a new volume (partition) with this space, or simply merge it to existing partition by extending the size of the existing partition.
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Entries (RSS)
December 6th, 2008 03:49
This is a great article, I would have used Partition Magic but that software won;t run in Vista. Thank You very much for posting this articlre it was very useful to me and saved me the time of mounting this drive in an older aka XP box.
December 5th, 2008 19:43
thank you man that is easy steps like water drink ^^
thank you very much
I add this article at my bookmarks
November 22nd, 2008 23:37
Thanks worked first time, great result
November 9th, 2008 06:22
Jeremy
I think you have the same problem that I have my Si2636, that I gave up not to spend 40 usd for one time use of USB floppy.
try load “Intel Storage Matrix Drivers ” while starting up with XP installation, for Vista u dont need it. Find below the explanation
Description:
The MS Windows® XP Professional installation does not work. On the AMILO there is no option in the BIOS to change the AHCI mode. So we tried to use a USB floppy disk drive to install the S-ATA driver at the beginning of the installation but Windows still cannot detect the hard disk.
Solution:
For the installation of MS Windows® XP Professional you need the Intel Matrix Storage Manager Ver.5.5 or higher, which you can download from the following webpage:
* http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/
October 30th, 2008 02:16
worked like a charm
October 29th, 2008 10:12
follow-up:
Well i went out and bought a new hard drive, thinking maybe the one in my laptop is just crappy. No luck, windows still cannot locate the harddrive to install on. bios can still see it. Any ideas would be helpful.thanks.
-jeremy
October 29th, 2008 08:26
Solution:
* Use DiskKill (doesn’t need registeration) and Kill the one with the EISA Configuration. If that is the one you’re working on, you will get the BSD (Blue Screen of Death) and your computer will keep restarting. Open the disc drive and plop in your OS installation disc. If you don’t have it, DON’T do this. Turn it off and back on. Follow through those steps on the installation, and choose a clean installation. Pick the unallocated space. After the installation, go through and have fun.
* If you have an unregistered Vista of like Ultimate, (not genuine) get an upgrade package of it. Do the main steps. (delete EISA Configuration) Get like Home Premium. It’ll work.
October 28th, 2008 19:18
Hey, i bought a toshiba satellite A205 with vista pre install and multiple partitions on the harddrive as well. I backed up all of my data I wanted to keep on dvds. Then tryed to completely wipe the drive using “Darik’s boot-nuke”. Dariks prompted an error message ive never seen before, so i removed the drive from the laptop and placed it into my desktop pc and successfully ran dariks to wipe the drive. Now my problem arises as i try to install XP onto the laptop, bios detects the hard drive but windows wont install because it can’t locate a drive to write to?! Ive tryed two copies of windows, tried adjusting significant bios settings to no avail. I can write to the drive on my desktop pc. just not the laptop. Any advice? and i don’t have recovery cds
thanks,
jeremy
October 27th, 2008 02:31
Mine keeps saying:
“DiskPart failed to delete the selected partition. Please make sure the selected partition is vaild to delete.” Just wondering if you can delete it on a dynamic disk. And wondering if it is the OEM partition.
October 18th, 2008 00:50
Thanks a lot. After searching a lot i got this article and it really worked.
September 27th, 2008 06:03
In response to Joe: It is indeed not possible to extend a boot partition, only to reduce it. The only thing you can do is to create a new volume with the unallocated partition.
September 25th, 2008 03:39
This is wonderful and worked well! However, diskmgmt won’t allow me to extend my primary partition with the recovery one. The recovery partition is unallocated in the ‘front’ of the disk. Diskmgmt only allows me to create a new volume using the recovery partition.
September 22nd, 2008 02:50
[...] this partition. if this is not possible all is not lost if you have a look at the instructions Here hope the explanation is clear but if you have any questions please post back and ask them before [...]
September 7th, 2008 02:31
This was exactly what I needed. My Eisa partition got stuck right in the middle of a new hard drive splitting the drive in half. This fixed it.
Thanks!
September 3rd, 2008 02:40
I’ve read this entire article and understood that this partition is useful for system restore or recovery…But , the EISA config partition is completely empty in my sony vaio….Can u help me understand this???
July 24th, 2008 20:48
For the record, I was able to follow these instructions and successfully deleted my EISA partition in XP SP2, without downloading anything.
July 18th, 2008 10:57
Bump! (if there’s such a thing)
Great advice. Now I can finally install ubuntu with more disk space.
June 22nd, 2008 15:20
Dude! Freakin’ sweet! Concise, useful, couldn’t be better!
kudos from one tech to another
June 21st, 2008 14:08
I got so far as using the diskpart tool but I didn’t know about the override switch. I pulled the drive from my laptop to use in an external chassis and wanted to clear that junk off.
June 19th, 2008 03:00
Thanks a lot. I was all over the web searching for this, but this was the only valid resource I could find. I too will recommend this to anyone who’s having trouble with recovery partitions.
May 27th, 2008 15:35
Thanks a lot, finally after searching for a way to do this this has worked.
Will recommend this to anyone else who wants to erase that OEM partition. (recovery partition)
May 1st, 2008 23:26
Your procedure works great! thanks.
But I would remove the comment from Andy since using CLEAN will remove partition information on the selected hard drive!!!
April 19th, 2008 23:53
thanks this worked great
March 19th, 2008 05:06
I followed these instructions but it wouldn’t delete the partition. However, once the disk and partition is selected if you type ‘clean’ it gets rid of it.
March 14th, 2008 00:37
Yo lo que quiero es reinstalar esa EISA utility de dell, que borré accidentalmente y que en mi dell xps usa 47 mb en una partición que tiene al principio.
Como podría reinstalarlo?