# how do I delete EISA partition from storage HD?



## mr. coffee (Aug 21, 2005)

I put an old Dell notebook harddrive (made by Toshiba) in a USB 2.0 enclosure case to use as a storage unit. It's working just fine (whether attached to my Win2k or WinXP machines), *however*, there's a 31MB partition on the drive, which I guess was put there by Dell to store maintainence software etc. I no longer need that partition, and I'd love to reclaim it for storage use. Is that possible? If so, can someone walk me through it. I'm perfectly willing to zap all the data on the drive and start over. I'm just not sure how... All I want is one big storage space--not partitions.

I've tried going to Disk Management, but it doesn't give me an option to initialize the disk, etc. When I reformatted, of course, the only portion of the disk effected was the larger partition.


ONE MORE QUESTION: How does one *combine* a partition with a larger partition. I have another Dell harddrive with a pesky partition (NOT an EISA partition like the one on the previous drive I mentioned.). How do I eliminate that partition and add it to the larger space on the disk?

I'm sure these are simple solutions, but I've researched this on the web and there aren't many clear answers to my specific questions.

Thanks for the help.


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## GripS (Apr 30, 2005)

"If you want to delete the EISA partition, Microsoft recommends that you back up any existing volumes contained on the dynamic disk, and then use Windows 2000 Setup, the Recovery Console diskpart command, or other third-party disk-partitioning software to delete it. You cannot use Windows 2000 disk Management to delete the partition or revert the drive to a basic disk until all partitions are removed."

See the rest of the article here:http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=242168

If you want to wipe it(the easy way) determine the hard drive manufacturer. Download the disk utility from said manufacturers website. Either boot the utility from a floppy or ISO image on CD-R. The disk utility should be self explanitory, if you need more help just ask. I check this forum daily.


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## mr. coffee (Aug 21, 2005)

Thanks, Grip.

Ordinarily, I'd just try to wing it, but something about partitioning disks makes me really nervous---even though I'm willing to erase everything on this particular storage drive... Are there any (free?) third-party programs you'd recommend to do the job--something that's straight-forward and relatively painless?

Also: I had another question about erasing a partition from a Memorex USB memory key. Same procedure?? No?


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## GripS (Apr 30, 2005)

I'm not familiar with any free partitioning software. This here is a free trial for partition magic 8.0:http://www.soft32.com/download_151.html

This will allow you to delete and format the partition(or resize the partition) without wiping the entire drive.

Not sure about the USB memory key. I'd imagine just formatting it within windows should do the trick.


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

I don't think you can partition most USB FLASH drives, and there's really no reason to want to. Just format it in Disk Management if necessary.


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