System partition drive letter

[TonyP]

I have a dual boot 98/2K system which I recently had to rebuild. I have two hard drives, one IDE and one SCSI, and the IDE drive has two partitions, making for three volumes in total. Win98 is installed on the primary partition on the IDE drive, and W2K pro is installed on the SCSI drive. For some reason, W2K decided during installation to shuffle the drive letter assignments around, and now the two versions of Windows use different letters for the same drives, which I would very much like to fix. Now I know that W2K's Disk Manager can reassign drive letters, but it won't let me change the letter of the system partition. Does anyone know of a way to get around this limitation? By the way, other than those few files like BOOT.INI and NTDETECT.COM etc, Win2K has NOTHING installed on the system partition, so this shouldn't be difficult.

[RWSchlatter]

you didn't mention the drive letters you actually see within each OS, and it depends on the partition formatting too.

What J expexct Win98 to see: C: primary on IDE, D: on SCSI (if it can identify the NTFS file system), E: IDE extended.

What J expect Win2K to see: C: primary on IDE, D: on SCSI, E: extended/logical on IDE.

What you cannot change for Win2K is C:, this is fixed by MS design as boot system. And you will have problems making it invisible. D: will now probably be frozen too, cause it carries the Windows system directory, and moving that after installation will give you headaches. So that leaves you with the extended IDE to reallocate a drive letter.

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Regards - Richard

[TonyP]

That is what I had always believed, however it seems it is not the case. Win98 assigns the letters as you say, but W2K originally assigned c: to an IDE ZIP drive (secondary IDE, slave). I want c: assigned to the system partition, but it is currently f:.
By the way, all partitions are FAT32, and as I said, it got it right the first time round, it's only after reinstallation that it's screwed things up.

What I see now (after some rearranging):
A: floppy
D: SCSI (W2K boot partition)
E: IDE 1 extended
F: IDE 1 primary (sytem partition)
G: ZIP (IDE 2, slave)
H: CD-ROM (IDE 2, master)

There is currently no c:, which, as I say, is where I want the system partition.

Any help appreciated, thank you.

[RWSchlatter]

you may be interested in the following KB article J happened to find:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q223/1/88.ASP (http://www.winguides.com/external.php?url=http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q223/1/88.ASP)

but take care cause of:
ürl[http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q249/3/21.ASP[/url]

______________
Regards - Richard