Go to "Administrative Tools" and then "Disk Managment"... You can delete the EISA Partition from there.

pcgeek11

Dear PCGeek11,

Thanks for your suggestion. I have tried that and I am unable to delete this partition through the snap-in. If I right click on the partition I just get an option of Help (compared to that of the C: drive where I can do a host of tasks such as shrink volume etc.).

I also attempted to delete the partition by re-installing the O/S, using the re-installation DVDto repartition the HDD, but the partition does not appear in the list.

I contacted Dell support via Live Chat (a nice chap called phil) who were similarly foxed and have promised to get back to me on Monday.

Any other thoughts in the meantime are gratefully received.

Cheers,

P.

The ESIA partition is a hold back from the early days of hard disk partitioning. I believe that the only way to delete it would be with a 3rd part software like partition magic or such

Here's a link i found by googling "deleting a ESIA partition"

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/02/29/delete-and-remove-to-unlock-eisa-hidden-recovery-or-diagnostic-partition-in-vista/

Thanks Dave, that was very helpful. I've managed to delete it using diskpart (mentioned in the link you gave) and now have 95Mb of unallocated space.

My only problem now is that this unallocated space sits before my main partition and therefore can't be incorporated into it according to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415.

Look like I will have to re-install Vista to repartition. But at least I have got rid of the EISA partition.

Update:

Booted up the laptop this morning to find a message that Bootmgr is missing so I guess that must have been on the EISA partition. So I'm having to re-install Vista and apply all the changes that I made earlier in the week.:smileysad:

Nothing's ever simple!!

You didn't need to do a complet reinstall just a repair..