where did the unallocated space go?

ok, i just got my notebook with vista home premium and i was trying to partition my drive.

I have an 80 GB HDD, of which around 8GB said it was for some EISA config and i had 68 GB marked C, out of which 25GB was used up. my first question is: what is EISA config? and why do i get only 74 GB of my 80GB? is that normal? i am not sure what all programs i can uninstall to free up space

so, i tried shrinking volume C, (it said it could free around 20 GB) and the system hung while in the process... after around 30 min, i had no choice but to restart the system. now, disk manager says in the graphic view that my C drive still has 68 GB, but i am not able to find shrink space. volume view says i have only 48GB now, but the unallocated space doesn't appear at all.

pls tell me, how do i reclaim this lost space?

 

Difference between binary and decimal. A 80 GB HDD has 74 GiB of storage space.

 

Lithus is spot on about the "missing" space. It's not really gone, it's just represented differently. Here is a relevant discussion of that subject HDD capacity measurement

As for the EISA partition. This is usually a recovery or diagnostic partition put on the laptop by your manufacturer. In some cases it's small (16-32megs) and has a few programs for scanning hard drives or starting a reinstall from CDs. Others, possibly yours because of it being 8 gigs, are a back-up of your system as it was at factory install. So you could restore back to your original factory settings if something went wrong with the OS. Instead of reinstalling Windows from scratch and doing all the driver installs, you just use the partition. Mileage varies between companies. Sometimes you access that partition in combination with a boot CD and sometimes you get to it with a key command at boot. In any case, it might be okay to remove it, but I wouldn't recommend it without consulting with your manufacturer first. Sometimes deleting the back-up partition will break the bootloader and you wouldn't be able to get into Windows until you fixed it. However, Vista's bootloader is pretty good about adapting to changes, so it might not be an issue.

 

So is GRUB apparently, I deleted a 5GB Recovery/utility partion & The system still loads.

As to why your system hung up, which partion program did you use? I recommend gparted.

 

well, i guessed that the EISA might be a recovery partition, as the manual said there was no need to write recovery disks

but the case of the missing disk space stills remains... i tried shrinking volume C that had 68GB. now it says 48GB but i can't find the leftover space after the restart. i just tried the "shrink volume" on vista's disk manager

 

i used diskpart and my volume is back to it's original size!

 

Good to hear, if you're having any more problem don't hesitate to post again.