Drive letter allocation

[Doug]

I have to format a new harddrive. The drive is already
physically installed in my computer and is already setup
in my BIOS as the primary slave. I already have a "C"
drive (set as primary master in BIOS) and I want the drive
to be my "D" drive. Two questions:

(1) Should I create a "Primary" partition or an "Extended"
partition? I think I want to create a "Primary"
partition, but I wanted to double-check that this is
correct. I wanted to make sure that this new drive can be
a "Primary" partition even though it is the slave drive,
not the master drive.

(2) When the New Partition Wizard tells me to assign a
drive letter, it doesn't give me "D" as an option. The
first letter available is "F." I guess this is because my
CD burner is currently "D" and my external harddisk
is "E." How should I go about assigning the drive letter
if I really want this slave drive (my second Maxtor
internal drive) to show up as my "D" drive?

Thanks in advance for any help!

--Doug

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

You can change the drive letter of the CD drive..... however do this with
caution.... any programs that you have installed on the PC from that CD
drive now automatically look for D: when running.... I'm thinking games
here.... also if you need to add/remove stuff like Office components and
even Windows components, they will also look for a CD in the D: drive. It's
often better to keep the drive letters just as XP likes them.... or you'll
probably eventually be down to uninstalling and then reinstalling programs
to keep the Registry happy!

 

[Doug]

Thanks!

-----Original Message-----
You can change the drive letter of the CD drive..... however do this with
caution.... any programs that you have installed on the PC from that CD
drive now automatically look for D: when running.... I'm thinking games
here.... also if you need to add/remove stuff like Office components and
even Windows components, they will also look for a CD in the D: drive. It's
often better to keep the drive letters just as XP likes them.... or you'll
probably eventually be down to uninstalling and then reinstalling programs
to keep the Registry happy!

--
Cari
MS-MVP Windows Technologies - Printing/Imaging/Hardware
www.coribright.com



.

 

[Peter R. Fletcher]

For this reason, the first thing I do after installing XP on a new
system is change the designation of the primary CD drive to X:. It
saves a lot of confusion, particularly for my less computer-savvy
clients, if I subsequently make other storage changes. You do have to
tell XP where its CD is f you subsequently want to do something to the
OS, but it handles that reasonably easily.

I also always call a device-addressable tape drive T:

You can change the drive letter of the CD drive..... however do this with
caution.... any programs that you have installed on the PC from that CD
drive now automatically look for D: when running.... I'm thinking games
here.... also if you need to add/remove stuff like Office components and
even Windows components, they will also look for a CD in the D: drive. It's
often better to keep the drive letters just as XP likes them.... or you'll
probably eventually be down to uninstalling and then reinstalling programs
to keep the Registry happy!

Please respond to the Newsgroup, so that others may benefit from the exchange.
Peter R. Fletcher