Drive order mixed up in win98 on dual boot system - need quick fix

[roscon]

Installed Win98se on Primary partion (c using Fat32 then installed win2k on second partion (D using Fat32. Drive is an IBM 45Gb 75GXP using Promise ATA100 controller.
Have another IDE drive with 3 partions (Fat32), a CDRom, Burner & Zipp drive.

Under Win2k - Windows Explorer all my drives are in a logical order.
Under Win98 - Windows Exploer my drives are all mixed up. C: drive is correct but the secondary partition with win2k of my main drive is shown as E:. D: drive is shown as the primary partion of my second IDE drive.

I am using an Asus A7V133 mobo.

Any quick fix or do I have to manually re-assign my drives in Device Manager?

 

[Pederv]

try re-fdisking the second hard drive and making the whole drive as an extended partition (no primary partition).

 

[Slikkster]

Your best option is to use Win2K's Disk Manager to change the drive letters in that operating system, so it matches what Win98 shows you. You can get to that in a few ways (Control Panel/Start Menu, etc.) but here's a shortcut. Start/Run/diskmgmt.msc
(all *.msc files are executable in Win2k). If you right-click on any of your partitions, you'll see an option to change the Drive Letter/Path.

You must remember that primary partitions on physical disks will always take drive letter priority in Win9x, before other partitions/extended, etc.

 

[roscon]

Thanks for the advice! Will try it.

 

[SemperFi]

to my knowledge fdisk has no option to make the whole drive an extended partition. I have not been able to do it. But that doesn't mean that it is not possible. You will need partition magic to do this.

In w2k you can use disk management to change the drive letters with the exception of the partition that contains the 2000 os.

I know this because I just did a reinstall of 2000 and now my os is on drive J. After my cd drives. Before the reinstall the os was drive E. Oh what a joy! :disgust:

If any can help me with this please read this thread

THanks

 

[Rob G.]

FDISK can create a whole physical drive as an extended partition I've done several times. Just create it using the menu.

In a two-drive system, the drive letter are allocated in this order.

Disk 1 - Primary DOS partition
Disk 2 - Primary DOS partition
Disk 1 - All logical drives in extended
Disk 2 - All logical drives in extended

If Disk 2 is all set up as Extended DOS, then drive order goes:

Disk 1 - Primary DOS
Disk 1 - All logical in extended
Disk 2 - All logical in extended

Rob

 

[jleon]

If he fdisks, you'll all your data if you wanted to keep it. I think there are 3rd party softwares that will remap drive letters for you. I'm not totally sure, but Partition magic might have a feature that does that. I haven't looked into it, just hafta research some more. Hope that helps.

 

[SemperFi]

W2K handles disks differently for some reason in win 98 my 2000 partition is still E drive. is there any way to circumvent this behavior?

 

[Rob G.]

Win98 assigns the letters as I described above and I don't think there's a fat lot you can do about it other than rearranging your partitions.

Win2000 seems to be able to change the drive letters of all except the W2K system partition itself. Right-click on My Computer, Manage and go into Disk Management.