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Creative Drive Lettering in Win2k?!?

A

AreEss64

Senior member
Okay, this is driving me nuts. This has got to be something I'm doing. I hope. Here's the box.

ABit KT7-RAID, 768M (3x 256MB IBM ECC DIMMs), TBird 750 @ 773MHz
SB AWE64 Gold, GF2MX400 DH, Mylex BT950R
2x WDC AC102AA's on HPT370 (ide3,0,0 and ide3,1,0)
2x IBM UltraStar 9LZX 10,200RPM 4M SCSI-UW (scsi0,3,0 and scsi0,4,0)
1x Seacrate ST410800N SCSI-2N (scsi0,5,0)
1x IBM UltraStar DDRS 7200RPM 1M SCSI-UW (scsi0,10,0)
Kenwood 52x CD-ROM (ide0,1,0)
Ricoh MP6201S (scsi0,0,0)
Toshiba XM4101B (scsi0,1,0)
Matsushita 12x SCSI CD-ROM (scsi0,2,0)

I have another drive that -belongs- at ide0,0,0 - an IBM DJNA 15.2G. I pulled it because it was always picking up as C:. And here's the problem.

The WDAC102's are setup in a stripe set on the HPT370. I have no problems getting 2K to see them at all now. Everything is happy on detection and recognition fronts. HOWEVER the AC102's are to be my boot/OS drive, partitioned 6G/Remainder. But the system absolutely and resolutely REFUSES to recognize these drives as C: so long as any other drives are attached!! Including SCSI! Boot order in the BIOS (Version 7N) is Floppy-CD-ATA100RAID. The Mylex has BIOS loading, but with a CD-ROM on id 0, should not be attempting to be a boot device. (It isn't.) If I remove the SCSI drives (just yank the UW cable and the internal 50 cable, which leaves me w/the two SCSI CDs and no CDRW) and leave -only- the stripe set, it sees it as C. Otherwise, it refuses to, and continually tries to boot from the 9G UW! (id 3)

I'm at wits end here. I've -never- seen the system behave like this, but I've also not used the HPT370 on this board before. Help? What am I doing wrong? What do I need to do to get the system to see the stripe set as C: always? Thanks in advance!!
 
Quick update...

Windows 2000 -finally- installed and running fine. (Far better than 98SE.. thank gods for a Microsoft OS with proper memory management.)

Catch 22 - it's installed and booting off E: and my second partition is H:!! The two CD-ROMs are sitting in the middle. ARGH! Help!!! 🙁
 
I have a number of drives and had similar problem as you. The biggest difference is that I don't have a scsi hard drive. It sounds like you might have several problems. First is there an option in your scsi bios to set non booting drives. I have an advansys card that has this option probobly worded different though.

There is a knowledge base article on the drive lettering issue I thought I had it bookmarked but I can't find it.
rolleye.gif
A summary of it as I remember it is if you boot 2000 setup cd and format a windows partition it won't use the same drive letter or something like that. What you need to do is boot cd format the drive and exit setup and reboot cd then preform the install. You can change drive letter to your liking in control panel>administrative tools>computer management. It is highly recommended that you not change your winnt drive but you can find a knowledgebase article on how to do so if necessecary.
 
OK, here is what you guys are forgetting. Win 2K/XP assigns and remembers drive letters according to the drive or partition serial number. This is unlike Win98 that just assigned drive letters in order according to which ide channel it was connected to. 2K only refers to which ide channel devices are plugged into on its first boot. On the first boot, it will assign drive letters and associate them with the device serial and they will remain unless you change them (boot partition excluded)

Now that the OS is installed, Windows will not let you change the drive letter of the boot partition. The only way to do it is with something like Partition Magic although I would still recommend against changing the drive letter of your boot drive.

Now I suspect you got into this because you installed the OS onto the RAID stripe with the other drive plugged in. It was likely a c: in another install. When you loaded Windows onto the RAID stripe, it saw that there was already a drive labelled c: so it picked another drive letter. You really need to reinstall Windows on the RAID stripe.

WARNING: You must change the drive letter on the IBM drive to something other than c: before you reinstall. Then I would unplug it completely while doing the reinstall and put it back once Windows is working on c: from the RAID. If you don't, you will get the RAID stripe as c:, then put the IBM drive back and Windows will boot seeing two c: drives. Your guess is as good as mine as to which one it will leave as c: and which one it will change.
 
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