Stupid drive letters! (Win98)

[vass0922]

Ok I just brought up a "new" 20 gig drive for my wife, she's running windows 98. I initially partitioned/formatted the drive at home on my machine with Win2k. Now I can see the drives just fine, the problem is it messed up the drive letters!! Right now it goes

C: HD1
D: HD2
E: HD1
F: HD1
G: HD1
H: HD2
I: HD2
J: HD2

HD1 = 6 gig drive
HD2 = 20 gig drive.

Can't repartition at the time, so would like to avoid re-fdisk'ing just to fix some stupid letters.
So how can I fix the letters fairly easily in Win98? Don't have 2k's disk management so thats not really an option.

any ideas?

[OuTpaTienT]

How are they messed up? What's the problem?

[EvilRick]

You can't. DOS Fdisk isn't that great. It looks at Primary Partitions and labels those first. If you HD1 only has one Primary Partition, it becomes C:

If it had more, they would be labeled sequentially. D:,E:,etc...

If your HD1 only has the one Primary, then DOS Fdisk moves onto HD2 and starts labeling there, the first Primary Partition on HD2 becomes D:

Now, DOS Fdisk goes back to drive HD1 and looks for Extended Partitions and labels the Logical Partions. Confused yet?

Here are two examples:

-Basically what you have now-
HD1 (Primary Partition) C:
HD2 (Primary Partition) D:
HD1 (Logical Partition) E:
HD1 (Logical Partition) F:
HD2 (Logical Partition) G:

-What you could have done-
HD1 (Primary Partition) C:
HD1 (Primary Partition) D:
HD1 (Primary Partition) E:
HD2 (Primary Partition) F:
HD2 (Primary Partition) G:

-Or this-
HD1 (Primary Partition) C:
HD1 (Logical Partition) D:
HD1 (Logical Partition) E:
HD2 (Logical Partition) F:
HD2 (Logical Partition) G:


You can ONLY have 4 Primary Partitions on a drive, or 3 Primarys and an Extended with Logical Partitions. You can also have the HD2 with only Extended and Logical Partitions. You might want to think about doing that.

It's kind of confusing, but once you see the scheme, it makes sense. Anytime you add a drive, it's going to look to that drive for any Primary Partitions

[snaggle]

Hey Vass,
Check this out
BootIt Next Generation 1.29e, Partitioning software aswell as dual booting and god know what, hope it helps.
http://www.tucows.com/system/preview/214244.html

___/Snaggle\___

[vass0922]

Thanks snaggle I'll look it up

Well the irritating thing is, I added the 20 gig to an existing system thats been up for awhile, so I THOUGHT it would just add the letters to the end seeing as HD1 has been setup for a few months now. The problem is, she has stuff installed on the D: drive, which now has evicted into the E: drive.

Ok I'll play around with things, see what I can do

[kendo]

A second, third, or fourth hard disk does not need to have a primary partition.

Instead, a second, third, or fourth hard disk can use an extended partition with logical drives in that partition.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q282530

[Psycho_Logical]

Order in Which MS-DOS and Windows Assign Drive Letters (Q51978)

How to Prevent Drive Letters from Changing After You Add a Hard Disk or a CD-ROM (Q282530)