HD letter asignment

[bhess]

How do I make the letters what I want? I have two HDs and the second HD jumps into the middle of my first HD partitions.
HD#1 C: E: F:
HD#2 D: G:
I want HD#1 to be C: D: and E: and stay that way whether I install HD#2 or not.

[M_Six]

Which OS?

[bhess]

win98
I have an abit be6-3 mobo so I have 4 ide's to choose from.
I have ide 3-hd#1 set to master ribbon cable to master.
I've tried HD#2 on ide4 set to slave and master and ide 3 set to slave.

[Fingers]

Unfortunately, with Win95 or Win98 that's just the way it is.

The 1st partition on the 1st "physical" HDD be "C". The 1st partition on the 2nd "physical" HDD will be "D", and so on. Any additional partitions on the 1st HDD will take the next available letter(s), then any additional partition on the 2nd HDD will be last.

If you had 4 HDD's with two partitions each then;
HDD#1 C:,G:
HDD#2 D:,H:
HDD#3 E:,I:
HDD#4 F:,J:

I've got an internal Zip drive and when I boot-up with a disk in the drive, Windows see's the "partition" and puts it infront of the second partition on my HDD... very annoying!

I haven't found any way around it yet. Sorry

[bhess]

****... Do you have problems when you load a program in D: then add the zip which moves D to E and try to run the program?

[truffeltje]

Check this site maybe this is what you are looking for.
http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig

greetz truffeltje

[Fingers]

bhess, usually as soon as I discover that I've accidentally started up with a Zip disk in the drive, I eject the disk and re-boot. After re-start, the zip is located after all my HDD partitions and before my CD-RW.(which is where it should be IMHO)

truffeltje, this is the first program of this type that I've seen. It looks good. Do you have any experience with it?

[Fingers]

I don't know how I got a double post that happend 7 minutes after I left the "General Forum". Oh well...

[This message has been edited by Fingers (edited 08-01-2000).]

[linux_guru]

Aint Linux a wonderful thing ! As as many drives, CD-Roms, Jazz/Zip, etc, as you like, and not a single drive letter in sight !

[danparkcityut]

Thanks Truffeltje, that was just what I was looking for!

[araaraara]

I think the reason drive C is on hd1 is because it is the primary active partition on that drive. Drive D on hd2 is probably also a primary active partion. I guess that the OS assigns primary active partitions letters first, and since you have two of them, the one on hd1 is given the first letter and the next one on hd2 is given the next letter.

[AuraEdge]

Thats true. I also had the same problem. Its fixed by making the entire second harddrive an extended partition, with no primary partition, and all the partitions on it into logical drives.
Problem is you have to refdisk it, making you lose all your data.
You may be able to do this with partition magic, but other than that, you hafta back it all up and fdisk.

[Goldwingnut]

It seems that my mileage has varied.

I use mobile racks to switch between OSes.

Primary Master is the C: drive.
Primary Slave is the CD. Always D
Secondary Slave is the Zip. Always E. It is jumpered to be a slave drive, but on the first ( closest to MB ) position on the IDE cable.
Secondary Master is the other mobile rack. It is on the downstream position on the IDE cable, but jumpered to be the master.
When using Win2K, the Win98 drive shows up as F:\. When running Win98, the Win2KPro drive doesn't show up, because Win98 doesn't recognize NTFS.

[tonym]

bhess,

I run into this problem every once in a while...I got around it by process of elimination, then addition!

I takes some work, but you need to remove your secondary drive...set the primary jumpers to master only and boot up the computer. The OS will then recognize the primary disk ONLY and then re-assign drive letters accordingly. Once this is done, you can then reinstall your secondary drive (remembering to set the jumpers) and then bott the system. Poof! Everything should be as you want it!

You can use the same process for a pesky ZIP drive as well.

Good luck...


Tony

[Ed_S]

It's actually easy once you learn the DOS drive letter assignment rules. I've been running multi drives since DOS 5 days, so feel really comfortable with it.
W9x still uses these, thankfully. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

First - two floppy drives ( A & B )

>Next is primary partition of HD #1

>Primary partition(s) of additional harddrive(s), in order.

>Logical drives in the extended partition of HD #1

>Logical drives in the extended partition of additional harddrive(s), in order.

>Other devices (CD, CD-R, Zip, etc.)
These can be set to remain constant via Config.sys commands, or in Device Mangler.
They do NOT have to be in sequence, letters may be skipped.

Thus, using my system as an example:

C = Drive one, primary
D = Drive two, primary (single partition)
E = Drive three, primary
F, G, H, I = Logical drives, HD#1
J, K, L, M = Logical drives, HD#3

N, O, P, Q = 4 disc CD changer
R = CD-R drive
S = 40X CD drive

Z = External parallel Zip drive

See, you CAN skip letters. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif This allows for future additions w/o changing the whole thing. I used to set the CD as "M" regardless, but the HD's finally caught up!

To make it more fun, drive 1 is in a removeable rack & gets swapped occassionally. Any drive to be used there MUST have five "partitions" or the mess gets scrambled.
I Like it this way to keep things separated & organized, plus it cuts down on wasted space due to "slack"

====

You CAN avoid the letters skipping back & forth between drives if you want, but it'll require rerunning fdisk on any drives above #1. THIS WILL (of course http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif) DESTROY DATA!!

From fdisk, first change to the target drive.
Then delete ALL partitions & logical drives.
Create an extended partition ONLY, no primary.
Create the logical drives.
This way, as the rules above say, this drive's letter(s) will follow those of the 1st drive.

See? It's easy! http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif http://www.sysopt.com/forum/biggrin.gif

Ed

[HfdWolfPack]

I just added a secong HDD to my PC yesterday.
Thats what I did; When I fdisked the second drive, I created an Extended partition and logical drives so that HDD1 would keep its Drive letters intact and just add e: and f: on HDD2.

HDD1:
C:
D:

HDD2:
E:
F:

G: Cd-rom
H: DVD
I: Plexy Cdrw

Not sure how to change them after though...Someone suggested Partition magic