Vista Partition Issues

I have a new laptop with Vista Home Premium and a 200 GB HDD. It came partitioned as such:

1. 102 MB FAT16 Healthy (EISA Partition)
2. RECOVERY (D: ) 10.00 GB NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition)
3. OS (C: ) 173.71 GB NTFS Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
4. 2.50 GB FAT32 Healthy (Extended Primary Partition)

A few questions:

1. What is the "EISA Partition", and is it necessary?
2. How do I recapture those partitions?
3. How can I create a new partition beyond Vista's 4-partition limit?
4. Can I simply burn the RECOVERY contents to a DVD and reutilize that drive?

I appreciate and guidance!

 

Bump. I appreciate any guidance anyone might have on any of my questions.

 

The EISA partition: My guess is you have some sort of media playback feature that doesn't require you to fully boot the OS to use it. I forget what Sony calls it, but HP calls it Quickplay. Its possible that the 2.50gb fat32 partition is part of the same thing.

I'd leave it alone if you like the feature.

I wouldn't mess with the recovery partition either, unless you made recovery DVDs.

Lastly, Vista doesn't have a 4 partition limit. Hard drives have a 4 primary partition limit. You can an extended partition, and limitless logical drives to get around that, but none of them can be booted to.

That said, to reclaim all that space, you could use something like gparted.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/GParted_d5757.html

 

Thanks for the reply. I used Parted Magic and was able to get the drives situated.