Partition and drive letter ordering

[Mike]

Hi:

I have two hard disks: one is master and the other one is
slave on the same IDE. The first hard disk is divided to
two FAT32 partitions and the second hard disk is one whole NTFS
partition. Windows XP is installed on the first FAT32 partition
of the master hard disk which is drive C:. However, Windows
XP assigns drive D: to the NTFS partition which is
on the slave hard disk and E: to the second FAT32 partition
on the master disk. I can use disk manager to change the drive letters,
but is there a way to tell Windows XP to keep the drive letter orders
same as the hard disk orders, maybe a registry key? That's:

Hard Disk 1, Partition 1, FAT32, Drive C:
Hard Disk 1, Partition 2, FAT32, Drive D:
Hard Disk 2, Partition 1, NTFS, Drive E:

Thanks.

 

[Jack]

why bother with that Fat32 stuff......NTFS much superior...

 

[Richard Urban]

The second hard drive has a primary NTFS partition on it. It will always be
seen in sequence prior to the logical partition you have on the 1st hard
drive. If you changed the 2nd hard drive partition to a logical partition,
it would have been seen as drive/partition E:

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[Gary Davis]

You have to rename d to f then e to d then f to e.
Yes you can rename them in disk manager.

Note if you have installed programs on your d or e then you will have to
reinstall these programs to correct the registery entries.

 

[Mike]

I forgot to mention, all the partitions are primary.

 

[Richard Urban]

Suggest you read up on partitioning. Go to PowerQuest and download the
manual for Partition Magic. Learn how to set up your computer. Learn how
partitions on different drives and IDE controllers interact with one
another. Then, start again with 1 primary partition on your first hard
drive - period!

Now if you want to get into something a bit more esoteric, and have the
knowledge and software to do so, expand a bit. Use a boot commander that can
hide multiple primary partitions. See! It all can be done - just not the way
you did it!

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[Alex Nichol]

I have two hard disks: one is master and the other one is
slave on the same IDE. The first hard disk is divided to
two FAT32 partitions and the second hard disk is one whole NTFS
partition. Windows XP is installed on the first FAT32 partition
of the master hard disk which is drive C:. However, Windows
XP assigns drive D: to the NTFS partition which is
on the slave hard disk and E: to the second FAT32 partition
on the master disk. I can use disk manager to change the drive letters,
but is there a way to tell Windows XP to keep the drive letter orders
same as the hard disk orders, maybe a registry key? That's:

Hard Disk 1, Partition 1, FAT32, Drive C:
Hard Disk 1, Partition 2, FAT32, Drive D:
Hard Disk 2, Partition 1, NTFS, Drive E:

You can't change the one where XP is installed - you can change the
others in disk manager and they will stick. At Control Panel - Admin
Tools - Computer Management, select Disk Management and look lower right
for the graphic of the drive.Right click, change drive letter. To swap
two over you will have to change one to some later letter - eg Z and
then change back

 

[Alex Nichol]

The second hard drive has a primary NTFS partition on it. It will always be
seen in sequence prior to the logical partition you have on the 1st hard
drive. If you changed the 2nd hard drive partition to a logical partition,
it would have been seen as drive/partition E:

Not in XP. Such absolute lettering applies in earlier systems, but to
illustrate I have my XP C on drive 1, with an extended containing D and
E; then the first partition on the second drive is NTFS - and letter T -
followed by F and G, FAT and NTFS

 

[Mike]

Thanks. I know how to rename the drive letters manually.
But, drive letters will be out of order again if I modify
the partitions.

I thought I saw somewhere it was mentioned what I wanted
to achieve. Maybe I was wrong.

 

[Daniel L. Belton]

Richard Urban wrote:




Not in XP. Such absolute lettering applies in earlier systems, but to
illustrate I have my XP C on drive 1, with an extended containing D and
E; then the first partition on the second drive is NTFS - and letter T -
followed by F and G, FAT and NTFS

Yep.. I have 4 physical drives, with 8 partitions. on mine, Drive 3,
partition 1 is the C: drive.

I can move the drives physically all I want to... change the
controller, master slave, etc... and the drive lettering in XP stays
the same... has to do with the signature XP writes to the drive.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I can move the drives physically all I want to... change the
controller, master slave, etc... and the drive lettering in XP stays
the same... has to do with the signature XP writes to the drive.

Not even that. XP has a registry key where names of 'DOSDevices\x:' are
mapped onto a description of where to find the partition - effectively
i think a record of the controller/subcontroller and start and end
sectors together with other info possibly - it's a long binary value I
have not attempted to sass out. But if you clone to a different drive
(with different signature letter as a result) and swap over things look
just as before. Key is
HKLM\System\MountedDevices

If you get in trouble with drive access it can pay to clear that out,
reboot and let PnP re-enumerate (you will then probably have to readjust
lettering)