What will happen if I format and IDE disk identified as Disk 0?

[John Wirt]

For years my machine has been all-SCSI (SCSI drives, 5 @ 9 gb each; SCSI
CDRoms; and SCSI tape drives). Bowing to the inevitable, I recently
purchased an IDE DVD-CD-RW multi-drive an EIDE hard drive (80gb).

Windows 2000 has recognized the new IDE hard drive and calls it Drive 0.
That's what the Disk Management app says. So far I have NOT formatted this
new drive drive.

I am concerned that, if I format this new IDE drive, Windows will only let
me format it as a Primary partition and place it first in the drive chain as
Drive C:. This would be a disaster because then all the current drive
letters would shift up and none of the programs I currently have installed
would would run (including the Windows 2000 operating system). I am also
afraid that Windows might try to boot to this partition but then stall
because there is no operating system there.

Windows has currently labeled the first partition in the SCSI chain as C:
and that is where Windows is. This C: partition is formatted as a Primary
partition. The current boot configuration is diagrammed below.

All the partitiions on the SCSI physical drives other than the first one on
the first SCSI drive in the chain are created as extended (logical drives).

I have specified 3 boot devices in the AMI BIOS: the Floppy drive A:,
"Legacy SCSI," and the IDE DVD-CD-RW drive. My machine boots fine to the
first drive in the SCSI chain without any problems.

The IDE SCSI drive is setup as the Master on the Primary IDE bus. The new
IDE hard drive is setup as the Master on the Secondary IDE bus.

I tried setting up the new IDE hard drive as a Slave on the Primary bus but
Windows would not recognize it. This was one of my strategems for preventing
the new drive from being placed first in the boot sequence.

So the issue is how should I format the new IDE hard drive, which Windows
has called drive 0, so that Windows will not boot to it? Disk Management
wants to format this drive as a "Simple" drive (which is some form of
dynamic drive, I think) rather than as "Basic" drive.

Thank you.

John Wirt

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Thecurrent boot configuration is:

Disk 0: IDE hard drive (80gb) unformatted
Disk 1: SCSI, drive C:, Primary partition, Windows 2000
Disk 1: SCSI, drive D:, Extended (logical) partition
Disk 2: SCSI, drive H:, Primary partition
Disk 3: SCSI, drive F:, Extended (logical) partition
Disk 4: SCSI, drive J:, Simple volume
Disk 5: SCSI, drive I:, Extended (logical) partition
Disk 6: SCSI, drive G:, Extended (logical) partition
CDRom 0, SCSI, drive K
CDRom 1, IDE DVD-CD-RW drive, drive E:
(initially, I installed the operating system on C: with only 1 physical
disk installed.)
(Windows called it Disk 0.)

 

[Dan Seur]

I believe you won't have a problem. Use Disk Management to
partition/format/name those new partitions on that new drive. You won't
be able to use any drive letters currently in use. The letters you
assign will be permanent. The system will boot and behave as it does
now, with new partitions named as you specified on the new drive.

In NT-class systems (like W2k) when you assign a drive letter to a
partition, that never gets changed automatically.

Each IDE controller on the system has a drive 0, and a drive 1 if there
are 2 HDDs on it. That will not affect your boot behavior, which is
controlled by the boot.ini file in your current boot/system partition's
root directory.

Your BIOS, as well, probably points to the SCSI boot drive as the next
"boot device" choice after the floppy drive. Even if your BIOS choices
currently are (1)floppy (2) IDE (3) SCSI, BIOS won't find the floppy or
the IDE bootable, and will proceed to the gool ol' SCSI.