Deleting so-call "EISA" partition (which won't delete in DM)

On an old laptop drive I connected with an external adaptor, I have a small partition which is labelled as "EISA Configuration ".

I can't delete it. No commands for managing it are active.

This is annoying. How do I override and delete this?

 

You can change the type of partition so that XP can deal with it.

There is a free tool for that. ptedit32

Change the partition to a type 7 and XP Disk manager should be able to deal with it. It's probably a type 12 partition now. Just be sure you work on the correct partition.

You could also use Partition Manager to do the job but it isn't free.

 

Thanks for the link to the tool.

It's frustrating that Disk Manager wouldn't be able to deal with it AS IS, without installing a tool to do what FDISK can do, primitive as it is.

Say, I'm having trouble finishing a format on another larger drive I got with another so-called "EISA" format partition. Since it's a 150gb drive and the partition is only 78mb, and it's only going to be a BACKUP drive, I figured I'd leave it.

Yet... I partitioned the space into two 75gb partitions, and tried formatting in NTFS but both attempts I made to format each, the format went to 100% then said "unable to finalize formatting ".

Any idea why this would be? At first I thought it was just a gaff in the connection but it's happened on 2 partitions, 2 times each. I've never run into an errorr like this. Could it be related to the eisa parittion?

If someone can answer here, that's great, otherwise I can ask in a new topic.

 

It sounds like the format process is having trouble initializing the drive. The existing Recovery partition must have hooked the MBR and isn't allowing it to to be changed to reflect the XP boot code.

I'd just go ahead and hose the small partition and reinstall the drive anew.

 

Well, I used the partitioning tool and started fresh. I had a problem, still formatting the second partition under DM, but I tried formatting under windows explorer and I had some success.

In general, I seem to get a lot of I/O errors and "delayed write" errors with the external drives on this system lately. I'm not sure if it's this laptop itself or what. Same thing happens if I use the PCMCIA USB 2 card or the internal USB 1 port. I will be switching to another laptop soon so if it's the laptop I can live with that but I'm wondering if it's something edemic in the drive, drives or the use of USB external drives in general.

I got the following error a couple times when trying to back up data from one external hdd to another:

"Windows was unable to save all the data for the file \Device\HaddiskVolume4\$Mft. The data has been lost "

I'd not encountered this before...

 

Looks like that HD is going south. The error implies that the Master File Table is having a problem.

Of course you should run chkdsk /f to see if it can "fix" any disk errors.

Also please see.

 

I will read that "also see" link in a bit.

But I have one thought for now...

SOME files seem to have problems on that drive in particular.

Now... IF, when I was originally writing those files, there was a USB I/O error, could that have corrupted their MFT entries on the drive? Such that NOW, there is not necessarily any problem with the drive or maybe I/O errors now, but the file has issues?

I ran checkdisk without seeing problems.