EISA Configuration partition & Vista

[stockhausen]

The scene:

• I have a Toshiba laptop - "Gb RAM, 160Gb HDD & Vista
• I have installed a 250Gb HDD replacement disk
• I used the "recovery" disk to install Vista
• I now have a 184Gb C: partition and a 49Gb "EISA Configuration" partition

Doing a google search, I came up with a site that describes how to remove this apparently useless EISA Configuration partition and resize to reclaim the disk drive space (LINKY).

My questions are:

• does anyone know why I would want to retain this partition?
• has anyone removed such a partition and were there any adverse consequences?
• do the steps described in the link make sense?

I would greatly appreciate any any sensible answers based on actual knowledge or practical experience.

 

[VeNT]

iirc the EISA partitions normally have backup stuff on them for recovery.

 

[stockhausen]

iirc the EISA partitions normally have backup stuff on them for recovery.

Very possibly. However 49Gb on a fresh installation seems a tad over the top! I suspect that this is in some way connected with restoring a 160Gb image to a 250Gb HDD.

As it happens, I have now deleted the EISA partition and the system seems to work happily. The problem is that I now have a 49Gb unallocated "hole" before the C: drive and can't see any way to merge the space into C: using diskmgmt.msc which only appears to allow me to shrink the C: partition

I could probably do it with Parted Magic but I am not sure whether booting will still work if I move the start point of C:

 

[VeNT]

iirc there is a growpart tool? not sure tho