Drive letters puzzle

[¤jº~¥Á±Ú]

I just build a new WinXP machine.

Mother board 4 USBs
IDE0 master 120g HD
IDE0 slave 120g HD
IDE1 master DVD/CD rw
IDE1 slave DVD rw

To my big surpries, it assigned drive letters as following:

C: reserve for USB1
D: reserve for USB2
E: reserve for USB3
F: reserve for USB4
G: DVD/CD rw
H: DVD rw
I: 120g HD (system drive)
J: 120g HD

Now my WinXP is load on I: drive.

I can live with this situation, but is it strange?

 

[John Doe]

I just build a new WinXP machine.
Mother board 4 USBs
IDE0 master 120g HD
IDE0 slave 120g HD
IDE1 master DVD/CD rw
IDE1 slave DVD rw
To my big surpries, it assigned drive letters as following:
C: reserve for USB1
D: reserve for USB2
E: reserve for USB3
F: reserve for USB4
G: DVD/CD rw
H: DVD rw
I: 120g HD (system drive)
J: 120g HD
Now my WinXP is load on I: drive.
I can live with this situation, but is it strange?

Coincidentally, that USB assignment thing was mentioned recently (but
I cannot find it in the Usenet archives, sorry). Windows XP handles
drive letters better than prior consumer versions of Windows.

 

[Tiny Tim]

Coincidentally, that USB assignment thing was mentioned recently (but
I cannot find it in the Usenet archives, sorry). Windows XP handles
drive letters better than prior consumer versions of Windows.

In your BIOS settings have you got the machine configured to boot from USB
devices before optical before HDD? I fon't know for sure but I wonder
whether setting boot sequence to HDD, optical, USB would straighten things
out a bit. But you may have to reinstall if you want XP on C:

 

[Spacen Jasset]

IT's seem a bit odd alright. You can reassign hard disk drive letters using
the computer management console in the control panel. But if you have got
windows installed on I: now then it's probably not very easy to move it.

 

[David Maynard]

I just build a new WinXP machine.

Mother board 4 USBs
IDE0 master 120g HD
IDE0 slave 120g HD
IDE1 master DVD/CD rw
IDE1 slave DVD rw

To my big surpries, it assigned drive letters as following:

C: reserve for USB1
D: reserve for USB2
E: reserve for USB3
F: reserve for USB4
G: DVD/CD rw
H: DVD rw
I: 120g HD (system drive)
J: 120g HD

Now my WinXP is load on I: drive.

I can live with this situation, but is it strange?

Well, it's strange if one is used to Win9x drive assignments

Win9x has a predefined drive assignment scan which looks to the IDE ports
and hard drives first but Windows XP assigns drive letters in the order
that devices are found by PnP.

It's a derivative of XP being less restrictive and more flexible.

Just off hand I'm not sure why yours 'reserved' letters for the USB ports
though. None of mine did that.

 

[Martin]

I just build a new WinXP machine.

Mother board 4 USBs
IDE0 master 120g HD
IDE0 slave 120g HD
IDE1 master DVD/CD rw
IDE1 slave DVD rw

To my big surpries, it assigned drive letters as following:

C: reserve for USB1
D: reserve for USB2
E: reserve for USB3
F: reserve for USB4
G: DVD/CD rw
H: DVD rw
I: 120g HD (system drive)
J: 120g HD

Now my WinXP is load on I: drive.

I can live with this situation, but is it strange?

Did you have a USB card reader attached when you installed XP?

I understand XP will allocate drive letters to a card reader if it is
installed during installation...

Regards

Martin

 

[techie]

To my big surpries, it assigned drive letters as following:

C: reserve for USB1
D: reserve for USB2
E: reserve for USB3
F: reserve for USB4

Can you be more specific where *exactly* you are seeing the "reserve
for USB" text? Does it say this in Explorer or Disk Management or
other?

As far as what you can do about this, from the Disk Management
console, you may be able to change all the drive letters. However,
changing the drive letter on the drive hosting the Windows
installation will cause the OS's bootup sequence to fail.
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[¤jº~¥Á±Ú]

I just build a new WinXP machine.

Mother board 4 USBs
IDE0 master 120g HD
IDE0 slave 120g HD
IDE1 master DVD/CD rw
IDE1 slave DVD rw

To my big surpries, it assigned drive letters as following:

C: reserve for USB1
D: reserve for USB2
E: reserve for USB3
F: reserve for USB4
G: DVD/CD rw
H: DVD rw
I: 120g HD (system drive)
J: 120g HD

Now my WinXP is load on I: drive.

I can live with this situation, but is it strange?

To clear things a little bit, I have a CF memory card reader installed, it
has 4 different type of readers, the c,d,e,f letters were assigned to the
memory card reader, not the 4 USBs, sorry for the mistake.

Anyway, the letters assignment was very strange, so I reinstalled WinXP
today, boot XP from CD again, it assigned letters in a more reasonable way
this time:
c: 120g HD (system)
d: 120g HD
e: removable HD (for memory card reader)
f: removable HD (for memory card reader)
g: removable HD (for memory card reader)
h: removable HD (for memory card reader)
I: DVD reader/CD rw
J: DVD burner
I was really glad that is finally assigned C: as my OS system disk.

I believe, if you have already formatted HDs, XP assigns letters reasonably,
but if you have raw HDs, XP assigns letters radically, and it will ask you
to create/format partition on raw HDs, and the one you pick, it will format
it and load WinXP OS on it, does not matter what letter XP assigned to it.

 

[John Doe]

I believe, if you have already formatted HDs, XP assigns letters
reasonably, but if you have raw HDs, XP assigns letters radically,
and it will ask you to create/format partition on raw HDs, and the
one you pick, it will format it and load WinXP OS on it, does not
matter what letter XP assigned to it.

The Windows XP installation routine will ask even if the disk is
formatted.

I think the assignment does have something to do with your card reader.

Glad you have it straightened out (looking better).