Problem: HUGE EISA partition - what can I do?

First post. Had a crash, reinstalled Vista and lost half of my hard drive to the EISA partition (102 of 250 GB). I can't seem to do anything with it in Disk Management. Here's the situation in Disk Management:




I can reformat the hard drive, which I SHOULD have done when I reinstalled Vista the first time, but I was just wondering if there is anything I can do about this huge EISA partition? It strikes me that it's about the amount of info that was on the hard drive before the reinstall - could that be possible?

I understand that I probably don't want to remove the partition with diskpart, right? I mean, I can see the partitions...




This is my laptop - Dell Latitude D830 so this is the only drive on the machine.

Right now you want to remove it and I understand. A few months from now you may come to us and say, I have a major problem with my Vista, and we will say restore from the restorration partition, and you will say, but I cant, I wanted the space. My suggestion, by an external drive if you want space. That being said.
Delete and Remove to Unlock EISA Hidden Recovery or Diagnostic Partition in Vista « My Digital Life

Thanks for the quick reply. Yeah, I have a 2 TB external drive, no problem with storage, I just thought the size was, well, obscene. I agree that I'd probably be back crying in a few months - I know the EISA partition has the restore info, though when I had the crash I couldn't even restore... Sigh, okay, I pretty much expected this answer, but I wanted to ask.

RE: mydigitallife link. Thanks. If I would choose to delete the partition (I probably won't), I've bookmarked that post.

So what would make the EISA partition so huge?

So you have an external drive, this is what you do
Download Macrium, make an image of the drive, update once a month. If you ever have a problem, you canuse the image to restore. Its better than the EISA, because it has all your software installed, upadates and everything else.
You can then delete, per my first post.
Imaging with free Macrium - Windows 7 Forums
I do not know why its so large.

Cool. Thanks again. I'll check out Macrium. I have moderate computer experience (mostly hardware and drivers, not as much OS and Disk Management stuff) and this laptop is old and I don't mind experimenting on it (I don't have any crucial files on it, though it's fairly useful for work occasionally).

Good luck with your testing, we will be here for you.