I was writing it to summarize concisely in a single post a couple dozen
other posts for the benefit of anyone that might ask the same question
in the future.

Is that ok? [I really don't care whether you think it is or not]

Adrian C wrote:
> Barry Watzman wrote:
>> As to the other part of the question, why it's called an "EISA"
>> partition: This was answered previously, but back in the 1980's when
>> Compaq and Zenith were doing their own thing to compete with IBM's
>> then-new Micro-channel (MCA) architecture, they came up with the EISA
>> architecture, and part of that was a provision for putting
>> configuration information in a hidden, protected partition on the hard
>> drive. This partition was given a "partition type" of 12H (18
>> decimal) and called an EISA partition. Currently, it has become
>> common (although not universal) practice now to use this partition
>> type (12H/18D) for manufacturer specific diagnostic / restore
>> partitons, but various disk software (including Computer Management /
>> Disk Management in MS OS') calls a partition with this type an "EISA"
>> partition, notwithstanding that both Micro-channel and EISA died two
>> decades ago [the market ignored both of them and stayed with the ISA
>> bus (augmented, for a time, by the Vesa VL bus) until PCI came along
>> in about 1995]. But partitions with that partition type still get
>> tagged as an EISA partition by various disk software.
>
> Why have you written the above to look like you were answering the
> question?
>