Drive Lettering

[corkyg]

Does anyone know of a way to get the 2nd real hard drive to carry any letter but "D?" I would like to make it "J." Am running 98SE.

 

[hans007]

there is a way to do it in the autoexec.bat, i'm sure someone here remembers. in win2k you can just set it in control panel->drive management.

 

[Floyd]

I believe you can fdisk the entire drive's capacity as an extended partition and then create a logical drive within it (or split it up into multiple logical drives). I did this with an external SCSI drive this weekend and it worked like a charm. It won't be a bootable drive, but it sounds like you're probably using it for mass storage, in which case it will work fine.

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[corkyg]

Floyd - here's the deal. My main drive is a 20 GB with 6 partitions . . C, D, E, F, G, and H. (H is only used for swap file and CDR cache for burning.)

I picked up a good old SCSI 4.3 Barracuda (Seagate). I have FDISK'd it and it is one big partition. Are you say that I could create an extended drive partition for most of the disk, and then HIDE the DOS partition? The extended partition would follow H, and that's what I want. It is only for a download area and digital imagery storage.

If I had to install Win2K to do it, I think I would forget the whole thing and get a Ord or Jif. This is to replace a SyJet that died.

 

[Floyd]

Well, actually I'm saying to use no primary DOS partition whatsoever. Just fdisk the whole ah heck as an extended partition and then create a logical disk with the entire capacity of the drive. Nonetheless, I think hiding a [small] DOS partition as you suggested would accomplish basically the same thing.

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[medic]

corky-g
Take a look at this Drive Letter Assigner

BACK UP!

 

[Crypticburn]

This is a real easy one:

When you made a primary drive on the 2nd drive, it forced it to use C: the (first) primary on the first drive, then D: the primary on the second drive, then all your logical drives. If you simply fdisk the 2nd drive into one big extended and then either break it up or make one large logical drive, it will put it after all your other drive letters ( I: comes after H: ) to make it J: you would have to do something else..... but good luck

 

[Floyd]

Gee, sounds vaguely familiar

 

[corkyg]

Floyd . . . here is a post-op report. I succeeded by trying your extended DOS partition in FDISK, but had to modify it to include my notion.

FDISK would not allopw me to create an Extended DOS partition with out a Primary DOS partition.

So . . . I created a 1% Primary DOS partition and a 99% extended DOS partition and foprmatted them. Then I booted to Windows and put up with the minor annoyances of things on the D drive and after not being found . . . but I was able to run Partition Magic and HIDE the primary DOS partition. I rebooted and that worked! Only the extended partition was visible and it took the last drive letter AFTER my main drive with its logical drives.

After all that . . . I find I am not really able to use the darned Barracuda anyway . . . it is too thick! Damn thing is 1.75-in thick and will not fit in a mobile rack or a regular drive bracket in a 5.25-in bay. I can always velcro it to the floor of the tower case . . . but . . . it was a good experiment. <G>

Thanks for the idea. I also downloaded the Drive Letter Assigned cited by CRV. I will be looking at it later.

 

[Floyd]

Hmmm, now that you mention it, I seem to recall reading somewhere that fdisk would not allow one to partition the whole drive as an extended partition. However, I've done it on several occasions so I'm not sure why/where that limitation exists. FWIW, I use the fdisk included with Win98 (dated 5/11/98 size 63,900 bytes) on a custom boot floppy. Clearly it wasn't a big deal for you to get around it by hiding the primary partition, but if you don't mind telling me, I'd be interested to know what version (date) of fdisk you used.

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[corkyg]

Floyd:

Was using the FDISK dated 4-23-99 that came with 98SE. Good observation. Maybe I should try an older one . . . I have some really old opnes (Like DOS 2.0!)

 

[Doomsday]

If you go to downloads.com you can probably find a drive-reassigning utility, but it will probably only work in Windows.

 

[Smurk]

In the good old days we had a DOS command &quot;asign&quot;. would that still work?



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