I restored my Acer Aspire 9815WKHi to delivery state (it had developed several s/ware probs). Before restore, I copied all my important stuff to this ans another small external drive. When I plugged them back in after restore they did not show in "my computer". I can see them in "disk management" but they are labelled "healthy, EISA configuration" and I cannot access the important data on them. How do I get acess to this data now please?

I think you are confused. Your data is not stored on EISA partition and this partition is definitely not your external USB hard drive because it (1) does not have any drive letter assigned to it, and (2) cannot be edited or updated by users that do not have proprietary OEM EISA utility software. Plug in your external HDD to one of the laptop's USB ports and wait for Autoplay to popup. i_Xp/VistaUser

No, I am not confused in the least, at least not as far as the situation is concerned. As to how this situation arose and how to recover it I am indeed confused and am looking for advice how to fix it. I thought I had made it absolutely clear - I have plugged both drives into all the ports on both my computers. The result is as I described earlier. Before I plug in the "plug and play" external drives, I see four items in Disk management - the EISA recovery partition on my primary drive plus the "C", "D" and "E" drives (my system has 2 internal drives, the 2nd of which is the "E" drive, "C" and "D" are partitions on my primary drive). When I plug in my external drives (one at a time) I can then see two other "healthy, EISA configuration" drives, with free space equivalent to the sizes of my two external drives, i.e. 1Tb and 160GB.

Something similar happened to me when I tried to add a secondary IDE drive to a computer that came out of the box with a primary SATA drive. XpUser is correct that "EISA Configured" is supposed to be used for OEM System Restore data, but sometimes Windows gets confused and thinks a real drive is a restore partition. The Disk Management snap-in prevents you from doing anything to any partition that it believes to be a System Restore partition. The only way I found to fix it is to use the DISKPART command-line utility to reset the partition type back to a normal partition, not an EISA (restore) partition. As an added bonus, this will leave any data that was on the partition intact. Here's how: Use at your own risk - Microsoft's help file for the SETID command suggests that only OEM's and IT Pro's should be meddling with this. You can mess up your partitions if you use the wrong ID! Search for MBR Type Byte codes online or go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib... first to find the right one for your kind of drive. The code for regular NTFS drives is 07 (same as IFS in the linked page), but yours may not be that type. Start > All Programs > Accessories > Right-Click Command Prompt > Run as Administrator DISKPART LIST DISK SELECT DISK [id of the disk with the errant partition] LIST PARTITION SELECT PARTITION [id of the errant partition] DETAIL PARTITION (Confirm that the ID is 27. 27 is the hex code for OEM reserved partitions.) SET ID=[correct code for your partition] You can now use either DISKPART or the Disk Management snap-in to assign a drive letter to the newly unlocked volume.