Adding partition puts last hard drive letter after CD drives; why?

[Old Geezer]

On my Win2000Pro SP2 system, I have a 60GB drive which was a single
partition, drive C, and two CD drives plus a virtual CD drive which were D,
E and F. I used PartitionMagic to add a partition, and this then showed up
as drive G.

Why?

According to PartitionMagic's documentation (and my expectations anyway),
the new partition should have been drive D and the CD drives all pushed up
one letter.

There does not seem to be any way I can change the logical drive to D;
PartitionMagic does not allow this change (it only gives me choices of G or
higher) and its remapping feature does not help either.

I'm sure this is not anything specifically related to PartitionMagic, as I
had a similar experience some time ago with another Win2000 system with the
hard drive divided into two partitions--the drives showed up as C and E,
with the CD drive in the middle, D. And I did not use PartitionMagic for
that. So it seems to be a Win2000 thing.

Is there any way to get the primary partition and logical drives in the
expected order, C, D, . . ., etc.? Or is it better this way anyway (to avoid
remapping)?

 

[pen]

It's done to avoid remapping the CD drives. Have you tried renaming the
CDs(,control panel/administrative tools/computer management/
disk mamnagement. Then rename the hard drive, into the now vacant slot,
then let PM drive mapper remap the CD's.

 

[tlswift]

W2K follows a logical sequence when handing out drive letters. As you
mentioned, you already had Drives C, D, E, F used up. The next letter in
the alphabet is G, so PartitionMagic and W2K allocated letter G to your new
partition.

Why should you expect it to be drive D? Because you were adding a partition
drive to C. Computers are logical and they act and react that way, so they
use resources in that context.

You can change your drives any way you want. You can change your CD-ROM's
now to X, Y,Z if you wanted to. Go to your Administrative Tools\Computer
Management\Storage\Disk Management and you've got the cat by the tail. A
word to the wise, if you don't know what your doing in here, playing around
can do damage to your system and you might not recover - so beware.

--
Terry

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to
become what they are capable of doing"

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

[Old Geezer]

It's done to avoid remapping the CD drives.

Ah, so Win2000 is just doing what it's supposed to be doing, then? Strange
the PM documentation didn't make this clear.

Have you tried renaming the
CDs(,control panel/administrative tools/computer management/
disk mamnagement. Then rename the hard drive, into the now vacant slot,
then let PM drive mapper remap the CD's.

Thanks. No, I hadn't tried that.

Actually I suspect I may have already screwed things up by remapping and
then attempting to put things back as they were. I think I goofed while
doing it. :-/ Probably should have just left it as it was in the first
place.

Not a big problem as it's a fairly fresh Win2000 installation, and I can
just save what needs to be saved and install it again. I'll try what you
suggest before that anyway, to gain experience.

Thanks again.

 

[Old Geezer]

W2K follows a logical sequence when handing out drive letters. As you
mentioned, you already had Drives C, D, E, F used up. The next letter in
the alphabet is G, so PartitionMagic and W2K allocated letter G to your new
partition.

Why should you expect it to be drive D? Because you were adding a partition
drive to C. Computers are logical and they act and react that way, so they
use resources in that context.

It seems to me that with Win9x, creating a new partition did as the
PartitionMagic docs say, i.e. the second partition became drive D and the CD
drive was pushed up a letter. I did that a long time ago and can't be sure.
But anyway the PM 8.0 manual specifically says (p. 37), "For example, if you
have one primary partition (C on your hard drive and a CD-ROM drive (D,
and you create a new logical partition on your hard drive, the new partition
becomes D: and the CD-ROM drive changes to E: after you reboot your
computer." That is exactly what I expected to happen.

You can change your drives any way you want. You can change your CD-ROM's
now to X, Y,Z if you wanted to. Go to your Administrative Tools\Computer
Management\Storage\Disk Management and you've got the cat by the tail. A
word to the wise, if you don't know what your doing in here, playing around
can do damage to your system and you might not recover - so beware.

Thanks, the previous writer suggested that too and I'll give that a try. If
nothing else I'll learn something.

 

[Airman Basic]

That was the way it worked in DOS through 98. Fixed drives came first.
2K and XP are different, plus they allow you to easily change the drive
letter designation in the software, which 98 certainly did not.