# EISA partition? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 19, 2006, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eisa-partition/373275 "2006-09-19T16:09:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![drachillix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/48db29/32.png) [@drachillix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drachillix)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2006, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eisa-partition/373275/1 "2006-09-19T16:09:40Z")
I somehow managed to convert a hard drive accidentally to an EISA parition probably trying to do a backup on another drive via Norton Ghost 10. Is there any way/utility to undo this or is the data on this drive hosed. The drive was the primary drive for one of my machines and I plugged another drive into that machine to recover data off of it. Any insight would be helpful. XP home sp2, drive was primary master/boot/system one and only, the drive I was recovering data from was plugged into the ide cable as secondary slave. ---
**Author:** ![Terminus\_Est](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terminus_est/32/3087_2.png) [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2006, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eisa-partition/373275/2 "2006-09-19T20:50:53Z")
The only EISA that I’m aware of stands for [Extended Industry Standard Architecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Architecture), an obsolete bus standard for IBM PC compatibles. As I rather doubt that you have magically transformed your hard drive’s physical interface, could you please verify what it is that actually happened. ---
**Author:** ![drachillix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/48db29/32.png) [@drachillix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drachillix)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2006, 3:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eisa-partition/373275/3 "2006-09-20T03:53:58Z")
[QUOTE=Terminus Est] The only EISA that I’m aware of stands for [Extended Industry Standard Architecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Architecture), an obsolete bus standard for IBM PC compatibles. As I rather doubt that you have magically transformed your hard drive’s physical interface, could you please verify what it is that actually happened. [/QUOTE] Thats the problem, I was trying to backup some customer files next time I rebooted the machine it could not find the OS. Tossed in an XP home disk and the windows installer detects an EISA partition where the NTFS used to be. I run a computer repair service and this one has me stumped. Luckily its one of my own machines not a customers :eek: ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2006, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eisa-partition/373275/4 "2006-09-20T04:07:39Z")
You’d need a partition table editor to change it back to the NTFS partition type. I don’t know of any offhand but I’m sure some motivated Googling will find one for you, plus the necessary code to designate it as NTFS. ---
**Author:** ![Terminus\_Est](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terminus_est/32/3087_2.png) [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2006, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eisa-partition/373275/5 "2006-09-20T16:44:33Z")
Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that before. The way I’d reset the partition table would be to burn one of those Linux-on-a-disk things to CD, boot from that, and run cfdisk from command line. Here’s the one I usually use: [http://www.toms.net/rb/](http://www.toms.net/rb/)