Deleting your Q1 EISA Partition

Most consumer computers these days have their drives partitioned: one for primary use and another for restoration. The Samsung Q1 is no different; it likely has a 10GB partition that you can't access because it contains restore / backup data. Unfortunately for the user the hard drives aren't very large to begin with. The average UMPC hard drive is 40-60GB and if you have 10GB of that taken for restore purposes that's roughly 10% of your available hard drive space gone before you begin putting anything of your own on it. Lucky for you I can tell you / show you how to remove it! It's a good idea to remove the partition if you want more space and have another way to backup / restore your computer. If you don't, you might want to leave it. It's also a good idea to do this when you first get your UMPC because it will require reinstalling your Operating System.

Tools Needed: External USB CD/DVD Drive, Original Operating System Discs (Windows XP or Vista), a pre-Vista Windows Disc like XP or 2000, and a USB Keyboard.

Note: The partition on the Q1 is an EISA partition. You can determine this by going to the start menu > right clicking on Computer > click on Manage > Click on Disk Management under Storage. You will probably have two Discs 0 and 1. The C drive will be installed on Disc1 (which is the second partition) and a blank drive letter for Disc0 (which is the restore partition). An EISA partition is not recognized by Vista and cannot be deleted by Vista, hence the need for XP or 2000 discs! See the following article by Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=242168

First you want to restart your Q1 / UMPC and go into the boot settings. On my Q1, you press the R button during the initial boot process. You need to change your boot settings to boot to the CD Drive first, instead of the hard drive. When you exit and restart, make sure the pre-Vista Disc (I used a Windows XP bootable disc) and boot into the setup.

Next, after the XP setup process (or whatever OS you used) has loaded; it will recognize both the EISA partition and your regular partition. From here you can delete both partitions (by pressing L) which will create one large non-partitioned drive that can then be partitioned into a single NTFS drive. Once the formatting is over Windows will want to start loading files onto the drive; it's at this point you can basically shut off the UMPC without any damage.

Since you are using an External CD/DVD drive, you can pop out the XP disc and insert your Operating System disc (this could be XP or Vista) and go through the normal reinstallation process when the system restarts.

* * *

As a side note on the reboot I sometimes had a problem where the External USB CD Drive I was using wasn't recognized by the system and it required an extra boot (not sure why). It was scary at first, but ended up not being much of a problem. You always need to make sure you have a bootable copy of the Vista / XP installation discs otherwise the installation process won't start. (Also make sure you are not booting to the additional software disc as they can look the same.)