I need to delete the EISA partition from a ghost image of a Dell PC HDD. I'm guessing that it would be better to hook it up to another PC to do this but thought I'd ask the mass intellect if there is a right way to do this. TIA

If it's in a Ghost image you can run Ghost.exp (Ghost Explorer) which should allow you to delete or add whatever you want to the image, I'd advise you make a copy of the image before doing so, just in case there's any problems restoring the modified image afterwards.

If your trying to remove the EISA partition from your actual HD, you'll need to restart your PC in Recovery Console mode & use the diskpart command to delete it.

Damn I already formatted the free section thereby changing the image but I'll try it anyways. Thanks!

you can also go into the control npanel, admin tools, computer management, disk management, then from the menu seletc delete partition.

Deleting the partition only effects data stored in that partition. If you are talking about thw whole disk, copy the data you want to say to a folder that you create on your c drive then you do what ever you want as far as deleting and repartioning the drive in question

Lawrence-
That option isn't available for an EISA partition. There is no drive letter associated with it and you can't see what is inside. It is an OEM partition where they save a basic copy of their proprietary setup for recovery purposesand it was ghosted to a backup disk by Ghost software. I am reistalling windows and on a new drive and want the Del lproprietary stuff gone from the back up as I'll save the Dell HDD in a ESD bag.

As an update. PartitionMagic 8.0 will get rid of the EISA partition with no fuss. Unfortunately you must buy it in order to do so, the demo wo'nt go that far on the first date.

Merc wrote:
> As an update. PartitionMagic 8.0 will get rid of the EISA partition
> with no fuss. Unfortunately you must buy it in order to do so, the
> demo won't go that far on the first date.

I had a similar goal with my Sysprepped Win2K Pro Ghost images I had created for my company's Dell Optiplex PCs. That 32MB EISA partition wasn't being used for anything and its presence just bugged me...

Here's how I got rid of it:

1) Boot the system off of the Windows install CD
2) When you get to the partitioning part of the install, delete the offending partition
3) Download freeware utility "EditBINI" from http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html
4) Unzip it onto a DOS/Win98 bootdisk
4) Boot the system with the DOS/Win98 bootdisk and run EditBINI
5) Update the partition number for your Windows install to reflect your system partition's new number (probably reduced it by one)

That's it. The EISA partition is now gone but you will still have the empty space where it used to be. To get rid of that use Ghost to do a partition dump of the system partition to your Ghost server, rather than a disk dump. Then pull the image back onto the system and the empty space will be gone.

-- Chris

I found a good site that helped me Delete my EISA partition. The site is:

http://www.kenst.com/2008/07/deleting-your-q1-eisa-partition.html

The site focuses on deleting an EISA partition from a Samsung Q1 Ultra Mobile PC, but can be used for just about any computer.

Let me know if this helps.