I'm trying to recall how XP assigns drive letters

[Milhouse Van Houten]

Let's say you have this, all on one physical drive:

C partition - Formatted, primary, bootable, system volume, FAT

The rest of the drive is unpartitioned.

You boot the XP CD and format two NTFS partitions. I believe these would
become two logical drives in an extended partition.

If you install XP onto that first NTFS partition, I think it would call
itself the "D" drive once you boot into XP (the FAT system volume being
"C").

If you install *instead* onto the SECOND NTFS partition, would XP still call
itself "D" or would it be "E"?

Thanks

 

[DL]

If you create two new partions and format them 1st would be D 2nd E
The winxp install would take the letter of the specific partition.

 

[Guest]

If INSTALLING onto a partition, first make sure that partition is the Active
one (use FDISK) and it will be C: This is the best arrangement, having the
system on an odd driveletter causes all sorts of issues.

Note also thtat you cannot boot the computer froma logical drive; boot
partitions must be primary.

Otherwise, in the absence of disk signature, Windows does the same as DOS -
that is, assigns the primary partitions on all disks first in the order of
IDE channel/partition number, then the logical partitions.