Hi, my brother has an Acer Aspire 4920 series laptop. It comes with Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit, upgraded to Service Pack 1. As with most laptops, there is an EISA Partition usually a few Gigabytes to contain recovery utilities and files. However, the EISA partition on his Acer Aspire is taking up 117 GB of the 250 GB HDD!!!

I know how to delete EISA partitions, so I happily ran Diskpart from command prompt and selected the OEM partition and deleted it. Formatted the 117GB of unallocated space and gave it an alphabet, D:, using Disk Management. Went on to install programs in that drive.

However, after a reboot, D: is gone and the 117GB EISA partition reappears. Repeated the steps and reformatted D: but EISA keeps coming back. Please assist. Thanks.

Do tell me if anymore information is required.

Hello,
Are you using a restore software like Norton Go Back?
It sounds like the system is restoring itself to the state before the changes that you made.
I would normaly advice to leave the partition, but 117 GB?
Try turning system restore off before you reboot, and look for programs like Norton Go Back.

I've actually cut the story short. It's a rather long read if it's important to know the entire sequence of events.

1. The laptop was bought under the school's promotion. It is from Acer and Windows Vista Home Premium.
2. As it is supposed to be used for school work, it came pre-installed with the "School's Image". The laptop came with Windows Vista Business with license under the school's name, along with other software that's needed for Java programming, networking etc...
3. My brother somehow locked himself out on the first day of usage by setting a password. Somehow he typed the wrong password twice...
4. He inserted the Acer Recovery Disc thinking it would restore to Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Home Premium appeared instead.
5. He realised that C:, the only hard disc drive partition, is only 120GB... the specifications on paper wrote 250GB.
6. Thinking we've been shortchanged by Acer, we went into Disc Management and found that the rest of the hard disc is used as EISA partition.
7. Did some Googling and deleted the EISA partition using Diskpart in Command Prompt.
8. Formatted the unallocated space and named it D:
9. Installed Company of Heroes and Gears of War into D: to test the laptop Testing took about 5 hours. :]
10. Restarted laptop as Service Pack 1 was installed later in the day.
11. When Windows rebooted, D: is gone. The space reverted to an EISA partition.
12. This time, we deleted the EISA partition using Diskpart again, but left it as unallocated space to see what happens.
13. Laptop restarted, but stuck at black screen with flashing underscore. No boot.
14. Inserted Recovery Disc to attempt to reinstall OS, Recovery Application said "No Partition, cannot install"
15. Inserted my Trusty Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2 CD (WINDOWS XP FTW!) and learnt that C: has become the EISA partition. Therefore, leaving the hard disk with NO system boot which explains why black screen at boot.
16. Deleted the 120GB EISA partition and started from scratch. Partition drive into C: (50GB), D: (10GB), E:(The rest of it) D: was created at 10GB hoping that it would be converted to an EISA partition, like what it did to C: when it was the only hard disc partition.
17. Pending...

I'm not sure what Norton stuff it runs, I know it has Norton Internet Security but I'm not sure about Norton Go Back. Will go check it out once it finishes restoring back to "factory" configuration... Thanks

Does the computer belong to you, or the school?
The machine may have been loaded with software that is designed to stop you from making changes like this.

it belongs to my brother. we paid for it. it's preloaded with school software so as to be able to use the school's intranet facilities. that issue shouldn't matter now since it's totally reformatted and back to factory settings preloaded with the factory crap like 90-day trial Norton Internet Security and 60-day trial MS Office...

After using Windows XP installation disc to do the partitioning (excludes formatting), EISA has not appeared yet. just used Disc Management to delete the 10GB and the 180GB partition and merged them into one big partition for data and program storing purposes.

This post has been edited by wjsim: May 11 2008, 12:19 PM