drive letter limit

[Guest]

Hi there,

I have 2 CD rom, one floppy disk drive, 2 hard drives. The following is
the drive letter assignment.

A: Floppy
C: Primary hard drive
D: CD rom
E: Slave hard drive (partition 1)
F: Slave hard drive (partition 2)

One of the CM ROM drive is missing and cannot be recognized by the
system. If I disable the slave hard drive, the system can recognize all of
the two CD ROM. Is it a limit of drive letter in XP home version? Or I can
modify some settings to make the system show all of my two CD ROM drives.

Thanks

Calvin

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

Unless you used TweakUI to disable drive letters, you should be able to use
all 26 characters of the alphabet. Sounds to me more like a controller
conflict. What, if any, events took place prior to this problem? Did you
make any hardware changes?

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Guest]

Please explain: You say "If I disable the slave hard drive". Are you
disabling slave HD on partician 1 or 2 ? or both. Then you say "...the system
can recognize all of the TWO CD ROM" What two CD roms are you talking about
after you disable "the slave HD ??
Rick is right. unless you used TweakUI to disable any or some of the drive
letters past a certain letter, you should be able to use all of the 26
available (A through Z)

Redwagon....

 

[S.Sengupta]

Your computer can use up to 26 drive letters, from A through Z. Use
drive letters C through Z for hard disk drives. Drive letters A and B
are reserved for floppy disk drives. However, if your computer does not
have a floppy disk drive, you can assign these letters to removable drives.

CD-ROM drive or DVD-ROM drive appears to be missing after you install
Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;320553

Restore Missing CD Drive
http://aumha.org/downloads/cdg­one.zip


Restore CD/DVD Drives to Explorer
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/scr­ipts_desc/xp_cd_dvd_fix.htm


regards,
ssg MS-MVP

 

[Guest]

Actually, I just unplug the power connection to my slave hard disk. I have
one DVD rom and one CDRW. I added salve hard disk, DVD rom and CDRW after my
windows xp home installed. Is it a problem? Thanks.

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

No, it shouldn't be a problem. So, have you checked that the jumpers on all
of the drives are set correctly? What is the configuration (which drives are
in which position on which ide chains?)?

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Lil' Dave]

Disabling is also a capacity within XP that means something else. That, to
me, seemed the purpose of the prior question.

Now knowing what you mean, this indicates to me there's a hardware ide
low-level communication problem between the hard drive you disabled and the
cdrom on the same ribbon cable. It may be that this is a WD hard drive set
to master alone vice master w/slave. Or, the cdrom with the problem has a
jumper misconfigured. The fix is obvious here. Or, the said hard drive and
cdrom have a clash in ide communication that you and any MS product can do
nothing about. The fix would be to put both hard drives on the same primary
ribbon cable, and cdroms on the secondary ribbon cable. Don't forget the
master/slave jumper settings. In either case, you have to open the PC.

 

[Bob I]

Sounds like Disk Management "letter assignment" time. Re-lable the CD
drive to a higher letter. Instructions? See Help and Support, "Disk
Management"