Drive letter assignment

[Charles]

Can you permanently change hard drive letter assignment? How?

I've tried Disk Management Console in Win2k. That won't change it permanently, It just manipulates the OS to read the drive as the choosen letter. It doesn't really change it.

 

[Warrenton]

Thats all you can to. Here is how drive letters are figured for win9x

Drive 1
All visible primary partitions in order
Drive 2
All visible primary in order
Drive 3....
and so on
Then Drive 1
all logical in order
Drive 2
all logical in order
and so on

For win2k it picks up the first partition or logical drive on each disk, then the second on each disk, then the third and so on.

So I have 2 drives:

Drive 1 is

2GB Primary
2GB Primary (one of these two is always hidden, bootmagic hides for other OS)
13GB Extended with single logical

Drive 2
20GB extended with single logical.

This results in win9x picking the drive letters up in the order I want. Win2k does it differently and will pick up the first partition on each drive first then the second, then the third and so on. I have to swap the logical on disk one with the logical on disk two.

As far as the virtual drive letter changes, it doesn't interfere with any program whatsoever that I have ever found, except DOS programs, which won't run anyway.

 

[beat mania]

there's no tool in w2k to do it? nt4 can do it quite easily with disk admin ...

 

[SUOrangeman]

beat mania, I think Chuck was already using the right tool for Win2K. But those changes *should* be in effect permanently. However, the letters don't carry over to other Windows OSes.

There is a post here (earlier this week) about a tool that will permanently letter drives in Win9x.

-SUO

 

[Charles]

Thanks, SUO. Hope you can give me a link to that post. I'm searching...

 

[Charles]

SUO, are you still dual booting Linux and Win2k? How to install GeForce drive in Linux Mandrake 7.1?

Thanks man... Letter Assigner

 

[SUOrangeman]

Hey, Chuck. I am now quad-booting WinME, Win2K, Linux Mandrake 7.2 Beta, and BeOS 5.

I've never owned a GeForce, though. My upcoming system will likely have a GeForce MX TwinView.

-SUO

 

[bonkers325]

damn man
quad boot
do u have a dual system suo

 

[Charles]

D@mn cool, man!

Do you use Lilo to boot those OSes? I want to try triple boot. I just didn't have time and right direction for it. I would appreciate a little help from you SUO.

See you guys around.

 

[SUOrangeman]

No dual system ... yet (c'mon AMD 760MP!). I've already got the specs laid out.

I have a Celeron 366@550 here at home and a P3-733 at work. Both systems are quad-boots.

I use Win2K's loader (NT Loader) as default. You basically need to grab the first 512 bytes of each OSes partition and add a line for it in C:\boot.ini. There is a Linux mini-HOWTO for working with NT's boot loader. I have, however, configured LILO to boot Linux, Windows (can't distinguish Win2K vs. Win98se/me), and BeOS. I just don't use LILO on my MBR.

-SUO

 

[Charles]

This idea sounds very reasonable. I'll try it. Last time when I tried to boot Win2k, WinME, Linux and BeOS 5. Something has messed up, so whenever I choose Linux it will boot to BeOS straight away.