Drive letter assignments

[SPARKI1]

I am just partioning up my 28 gig drive in to two 4 gig partions for each OS and the rest for data. The reason is for a win98 win2000 dual boot. Also in the system is an 8 gig back-up drive, a cd-rom and a Floppy.

The drive assignmetns are as follows.

Floppy A:
CD-ROM D:
8 gig E:
4gig partition C:
4gig partition F:
20gig partition G:

Why question is is it possible to get the drives to be labeled:

Floppy A:
CD-ROM D:
4gig partition C:
4gig partition F:
20gig partition E:
8 gig G:

Cheers

[Target]

Yes it is possible.

I know you can do this with Fdisk, and you should be able to do it with a utility like partition magic, though I have not personally tried.

Anybody else swapped partitions around in this manner with Partition magic or is re-fdisking the only real alternative here?

[Dave_H]

I think your CD-Rom drive is either being mis-identified in the BIOS, or the jumper setting may be wrong. The CD-Rom drive letter should follow the hard drives.

As for the Hard drives, put the big one in by it's self one the primary IDE and format it as you wish, setting the first partition as a primary active partition.
Then add the second 8GB drive and set it up as an extended DOS partition and create a logical drive inside that partition.
Your drive letters will end up like this:

Floppy -A
4gig -C
4gig -D
20gig -E
8gig -F (second drive)
CD-Rom -G

Windows will allow you to assign a drive letter farther back for the CD-Rom, so you may want to go ahead and "push it back" a few letters in case you need to add or change partitions in the future.
Best of luck,
Dave

[Target]

Good catch on the CDROM deal Dave. I forgot to mention that.

[Ed_S]

I'm not totally sure about W2K, but OS's up to 98SE won't allow you to reassign the CD drive to any letter prior to the highest HD partition's letter. It won't work. Letter assignments MUST conform to these rules:


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, and letters may be skipped.


As long as you conform to that, you can partition it any which way you want!

We had a discussion recently about drive letter assignments here. (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/007805.html)

Good luck!
Ed

[linux_guru]

Another reason why I use Linux: 14 partitions, 2 CD-Roms, tape, etc, and not a single drive letter in sight. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif