How do I remove the DELL EISA partition?

Hello!

I recently bought a notebook from DELL (specifiactions in my signature), and it has a 47MB (or so) EISA partition, which is really, really annoying. Annoying because I formatted the whole notebook when it came out, and made 4 partitions with my own sizes -

(I should get 149GB of 160GB.)


But now, after installing Vista on it, this is how partitions show -

Some portion of each parition is off, and I think the EISA partition is at fault. I calculated the sizes to bytes while I was creating these partitions, like I did with Windows XP.

How can I remove this partition? Or is it something else at fault?

 

The partition is not the fault. The difference is most likely due to the way the size info is calculated. It dates back to the definition of 1k. Is it 1000 bytes or 1024 bytes? This is because the closest power of 2 (binary) representation of 1000 is 1024.

This variance in definition also applies to 1meg. Is it 1,000,000 bytes or 1,048,576 bytes. And then we have 1gig. Is it 1,000,000,000 bytes or 1,073,741,824?

So your 24.9 gig partition is actually 26,36,71,418 bytes.

Gary

 

No, I did everything with 1024 bit taken in mind. I'm not SUCH a noob. It works fine with my PC, but here, it comes out as XX.9GB.

 

No offense, but 47MB seems like an incredibly trivial amount of space. Is it really that hard to live with?

Anyway, it may be the addresses for the partitions that are taken up that very slight amount of space.

 

Which program did you use to partition your HD?

Because this could be the effect of aligning the partition to the next cylinder.
The .9 doesn't mean you are losing .1 GB, that is 100 MB, but that the partition size is a tad shorter than the round number you expected.

Besides, it could be Vista's fault in computing the right numbers.
Try to look at your partition table and check out the number of sectors used by each one.

 

<grin>

NO, NO, NO. I wasn't trying to suggest YOU were a noob, just that there may be a difference in the way Vista and XP handle the variance in the numbers.

Gary

 

My problem is not the lost 47 MB, it is the partitions showing as, for example, 84.9GB, instead of 85GB.

I used the Windows Vista Home Premium disc provided by DELL to partition the disc. I put in the DVD, removed EVERYTHING that was on the harddisk, created a big bundle of empty space, and put in values for the partition sizes.

My 28.9 GB drive (E:\) has this many bytes - 31,13,85,08,800. It turns out to be 29695.99609375 MB. I, when asked for E drive's size while installing Vista, put the value as 29696 MB (this making it 29GB). How could it have been changed by itself?

How do I find out about the number of sectors?

Is there any way to find out if there's a difference?


Now when I try to go to Computer Management, and lcick Disk Management, I get the following error - "Could not star VDS (Virtual Disk Service). VDS supports Windows 2003, IA64XP or later. Use terminal services for non-VDS Machine."

 

In fact, 31128508800/1024/1024 is 29696 and 29696/1024 is 29.
Perhaps excel 2007 is not the only MS program with problems in computing divisions.

Oh, I have many similar questions concerning MS OSes...
There seems to be a form of artificial negligence built-in.

Straight from the horse's mouth (i.e. the MBR): http://ata-atapi.com/hiwtab.htm
Since you're at it, consider making a copy of your MBR in Linux (using dd as shown here),

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda of=mbr.bin bs=512 count=1

then read the 64 byte of the partition table, grab a calculator and establish a carnal knowledge with your hard disk.






Those 64 bytes, print them out and store them in a safe place.

 

What? No! I used Windows Calculator, and it gave me 29695.99609375 MB. Maybe Excel just rounded it off.

 

I reformatted my hard drive to have exactling 1,024,000 MB on the main (C:\) partition with Vista's partitioning tool, leaving the rest unallocated. When I start Windows, it says C:\ has 99.9 GB.

The drive should have 107,374,182,400 bytes for 100 GB as I allocated it. It actually has 107,374,178,304 according to C:\'s properties. The difference? Exactly 4096 bytes - 4 KB.

I suspect that 4 KB is set aside for the root directory of C:\. And I think that's the exact same difference you're having.

My drive: 99.999996 GB, instead of 100 GB
Your drive (using your MB stat above): 28.999996 GB instead of 29 GB.

Annoying not to have the nice, round number, but that's why. I plan to allocate 102401 MB next time I reformat to have the nice, even 100 GB .

 

Does it happen for ALL the partitions?

 

You're right.
I tried to reproduce the calculation today and got a non-integer result. Only explanation is that I used the other byte number you gave. Sorry.

The 4096 pointed out by Apollo13 could just be the first cluster, actually not usable since it will carry partition information data.
Here's a description for the old FAT32 partition structure showing that more than a sector can be reserved to store partition data.