Hard drive letters mix up

[altaire52]

I have 2 hard disks with 2 patritions on each Hard Disk.
My problem is that Windows 98 mixes the drive letters.
Example: The 1'st partition on the 1'st drive ic C; the 1'st partition on the 2'nd drive is D; the 2'nd partition on the 1'st drive is E; and finally the 2'nd partition on the 2'nd drive is F.
Is there a way to change this disorder, like in NT or something?

[RWSchlatter]

no - this is a msdos inheritance.

"...this disorder..."
what you feel to be a disorder - it is not - it is clearly defined.
But the effects can be rather annoying when you repartition your disks.

One tip: in the Device Manager you can reallocate drive letters for removable media (not diskettes, the remain A: and B: for historical reasons) to use drive letters at the high end of the alphabet. If you the create more disk partitions, at least these drive letters will not move too.

______________
Regards - Richard<P ID="edit"><FONT class="small">Edited by RWSchlatter on 08/14/01 22:13.</FONT></P>

[redhades]

I think its because the system prioritises the Primary partitions when it come's to assigning drive letters. The reason why you are getting the first partitions of your two HDs as C: and D: is because they are the "primary" partitions of each HD. The E: and F: end up being the "extended" partitions of your two HDs. This happen when you use FDISK on both HDs. FDISK creates only one "primary" partition and as many "extended" partitions as you want (default is one extended). You nead to get your hands on Ranish:

http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part/part.zip

It's realy good partition manager in DOS that permits you to make more than one "primary" partition on a single disk. You will nead to split you first HD in two "primary" partions, and a "pimary" and "extended" partition on your second HD.
You will get...
C: your first "primary" on master disk
D: your second "primary" on master disk
E: your "primary" on slave disk
F: your "extended" on slave disk

Ranish is a bit scary a first glance, but going thrue the readme and trying a fiew test on an empty HD will put you at ease. And you should run it from a disk formated with system files.

Oh yeah.. HD stands for "Hard drive"


&lt;o&gt; ЯЄÐĦΔĎΣŞ &lt;o&gt;

[7ate9]

By your last comment, i assume you also hve NT installed on the box. One problem the Drive letter get mixed up, may be due to the way in which 98 and NT read partitions. if any drives are formatted in NTFS, 98 may not be able to see them. Same if any of them are FAT16, NT may not be able to read the drive.
Heh, it's late here and I'm tired as hell, forgive me if I'm wrong };&gt;

-= 7ate9 =-

[altaire52]

Thank you for this little utility
I've just downloaded it and I'll give it a try.

:)

[redhades]

Here is a good link in case you nead help with Ranish:
http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part/help.htm

I would like to know if you succede in fixing your problem.

&lt;o&gt; ЯЄÐĦΔĎΣŞ &lt;o&gt;

[altaire52]

I've done everything acording to your advice:
I've made two Primary partitions on the 1'st HD.
The first partition is a 2GB fat-16 partition couse I want to install NT 4.0 on it. (alongside win98)
The second partition is Fat-32 about 26.7GB (The hard drive is a 30GB Quantum).

Now comes the second HD:

I used this drive before I bought the 30Gig; and I have had partitioned it with Fdisk to a 2GB fat-16 and a 4.1GB fat-32 partition.
Now I deleted only the second partition from the drive with Ranish and created an extended fat-32 partition instead of it. (maybe this is where I made the error and I should have deleted all partitions and completely re-created them with Ranish)
What I got after this is the following:

The 1'st primary partition on the first HD is C:
The 1'st primary partition on the second HD is D:
The 2'nd extended partition on the second HD is E:
and the 2'nd primary partition on the first HD is F:

One thing more I couldn't figure out what it serves for is:
there is an option in Ranish "which row in MBR to put this parition..."
I tried some variation on this too but it changed nothing.
I hope I could get myself understood.

[Paul D]

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q51/9/78.ASP

This MS Knowledge Base article explains how drive letters are assigned.

They're not "messed up" at all, they are entirely logical (bad pun)

Paul D

[redhades]

This is a copy of the reply a gave altaire52's private message. I'm puting it here to make to shure other peaple participate to this conversation and post there point of view on the subject.

=================================

Hmm...
Let me rephrase your problem in more "understandfull" way cuz your definition got me a bit confused.

Your...
C: is PRIMARY 2gig fat16 on master disk with boot flag ON.
D: is PRIMARY 2gb fat16 on slave disk.
E: is EXTENDED 4.1gb fat32 on slave disk.
F: is PRIMARY 26.7gb fat32 on master disk.

Have I understood this well? Is this your curent problem?

If It is all that, reply me about this:
-Is the jumper settings on your disks ok? Some times they can be confusing. stuff like "stand alone" or "master with slave not present" can be found on certain hard drives.
-Do you have more than two IDE socket on your motherboard. Something like IDE3 and IDE4? These sockets usualy nead a special controler. Hard drives pluged on them wont be detected by the regular bios. Only by that controler.
-Are both hard drive pluged on the same cable? Try puting them on diffrent IDE cables without any CDdrive instaled. Just to see if the result changes.


&lt;o&gt; ЯЄÐĦΔĎΣŞ &lt;o&gt;

[Paul D]

Nope, redhades

C: is PRIMARY 2gig fat16 on master disk with boot flag ON.
D: is PRIMARY 2gb fat16 on slave disk.
E: is EXTENDED 4.1gb fat32 on MASTER disk.
F: is PRIMARY 26.7gb fat32 on SLAVE disk.

what you suggested is entirely impossible in 98. Unless this Ranish thing could do it, which I doubt, because Partition Magic couldn't.
Read the Knowledge Base article I posted. It's longish, but worth the effort

Paul D

[RWSchlatter]

Thank you Paul for finding that KB article !

J was looking for it but somehow must have used the wrong keywords.

______________
Regards - Richard

[redhades]

From Paul D:
"what you suggested is entirely impossible in 98. "

Wich suggestion of mine do you say is impossible? I gave more thant one suggestions.

Thanks for the link Paul D. I check it out and and learned some good stuff. I was half right I guess. DOS does prioritise primary partition. What I didn't know is that once a primary partition is found on a hard drive, DOS jumps to the next phisical drive to check for other primary partitions to mount. But I still confused as why Altaire52 ended up with a primary partition as last drive, right after an extended partition; That I dont get.

From what I red on that article, Altaire52 should put on his slave disk one extended partition split in two logical drives.

Right?

&lt;o&gt; ЯЄÐĦΔĎΣŞ &lt;o&gt;

[altaire52]

Thank you Paul D for the link
I've read it and understood the MS-DOS drive letter assignment procedure, but what's still bothering me is: (what redhades wrote too) how could a primary partition got to the end of the line as drive F:?!
Why not E:? and F: for the extended partition on the second HD instead.

One more thing - redhades got it right, the drive letter order is the following:

C: is PRIMARY 2gb fat-16 on master disk with boot flag ON.
D: is PRIMARY 2gb fat-16 on slave disk.
E: is EXTENDED 4.1gb fat-32 on slave disk.
F: is PRIMARY 26.7gb fat-32 on master disk.


<P ID="edit"><FONT class="small">Edited by altaire52 on 08/16/01 20:43.</FONT></P>

[altaire52]

Hello to everyone!

I've tried putting the second HD on the second IDE cable instead of the CD-Rom both in master and slave mode but the drive letter order remained the same.
I tried to put the hard drive's jumpers on "CS" but this only reversed the order BIOS detected the HDs, but in Windows 98 it remained the same:
C: is PRIMARY 2gb fat16 on master disk with boot flag ON.
D: is PRIMARY 2gb fat16 on slave disk.
E: is EXTENDED 4.1gb fat32 on slave disk.
F: is PRIMARY 26.7gb fat32 on master disk.

Altaire52

[RWSchlatter]

please read the supplied information exactly, this is the result of the scheme described in the KB article that Paul found for you !

Drive C according to pt.3
Drive D according to pt.4
Drive E according to pt.5
Drive F according to pt.6 (second sentence "after all logical drives...")

No further comment required !

______________
Regards - Richard

[Paul D]

My apologies.
My tiny brain didn't grasp the fact that there was a third Primary at F.
But at the same time, as RWSchlatter says, the MSKB article explains that, too.
So I guess I did help a bit!

Paul D