USB drive letter under DOS

[Gisle Vanem]

I purchased a nice little 64MByte TwinMOS USB flash-disk.
Mostly for the price since it was only $20.

To my amazement it works in plain DOS too without any software
driver. I assume my BIOS supports this in some magically way.

My problem is that the flash-disk under DOS is assigned to letter
'D'. This screws up my environment settings and autoexec etc.
Is it possible to force it to say G: (after my RAM-disk)?

My PC has a Phoenix Award BIOS (6.00PG). The motherboard
is an AOpen AX4B Pro-533 with a 2.2 GHz Pentium IIII.
The TwinMOS nor Phoenix manuals mentioned this problem.

 

[Andrew Rossmann]

I purchased a nice little 64MByte TwinMOS USB flash-disk.
Mostly for the price since it was only $20.

To my amazement it works in plain DOS too without any software
driver. I assume my BIOS supports this in some magically way.

My problem is that the flash-disk under DOS is assigned to letter
'D'. This screws up my environment settings and autoexec etc.
Is it possible to force it to say G: (after my RAM-disk)?

My PC has a Phoenix Award BIOS (6.00PG). The motherboard
is an AOpen AX4B Pro-533 with a 2.2 GHz Pentium IIII.
The TwinMOS nor Phoenix manuals mentioned this problem.

There is probably no way to change the drive letter. DOS usually
searches first for primary partitions on each drive, then logical drives
in extended partitions. It assigns drive letters in the order they are
found. Since DOS uses standard BIOS calls, your BIOS Is apparantly USB
aware and making it drive 1 (your main hard drive is drive 0.)

Drive lettering was always a problem with DOS/Win9x/ME. If you ran
Win9x/ME, it might also force your USB drive to D if it was on during
bootup.

About the only way I can see to allow a drive letter change might be to
disable your BIOS recognize, then try and find a driver, if one exists.
Even then, you still may not be able to set the letter. You would need to
create letters to fill in.

 

[Gisle Vanem]

There is probably no way to change the drive letter. DOS usually
searches first for primary partitions on each drive, then logical drives
in extended partitions. It assigns drive letters in the order they are
found. Since DOS uses standard BIOS calls, your BIOS Is apparantly USB
aware and making it drive 1 (your main hard drive is drive 0.)

Thanks for the claification. I swear I once heard of a utility that
could swap the driver-letters around once DOS was finished booting.
Can't find it now off cource.

About the only way I can see to allow a drive letter change might be to
disable your BIOS recognize, then try and find a driver, if one exists.

Fat chance I think. DOS is hardly something the USB manufacturers
care about :-( DOS = "Denial of Service Attacks" these days....