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How to assign drive letters in FDISK?

S

supesman

Senior member
I currently have this situation when I look at the partitions in fdisk:

*: Non-DOS partition
*: NTFS partition

I want to change the *: to c: or d: or whatever since I can't access them. The first one was my old win98se and I created a new NTFS partition but for some reason the drive letters went away. If i can i would like to restore win 98. If not, how do I go about formatting the computer to get rid of these partitions and have only one for windows xp?
 
FDISK will recognize NTFS partitions as simply non-DOS. why do you need to work with them by drive letter in FDISK? create the partitions necessary, reboot and then you should be able to access them in order of role; primary,extended = C,D.. so on, and then E would be your CD-ROM drive if you had no more partitions. HTH.
 
im confused...


Fdisk should list an NTFS partion as non-DOS ... and if oyu had an old win98 partition it would be FAT16 or FAT32 ....

did you ever install any EZbios software for your hard drive?
 
no, it doesn't list NTFS as non-dos. it only lists the *: not c: so i can't access c: from dos. I created the NTFS partition by using Partition Magic. But now, i'll be happy to format the whole system and start all over by installing win xp. But if i can't access the HD how can I format it?
 
i was just saying how fdisk should see it...

last time i made an NTFS partion with partionmagic, win2k couldnt recognize it...

in Fdisk, just delete all your partitions, so there is none on there (you lose all data) and start your WinXP install and it should take care of setting up stuff for you... then you can play with your partiton sizes later i guess with partition magic
 
no, it doesn't list NTFS as non-dos. it only lists the *: not c: so i can't access c: from dos

Because DOS can't read NTFS, you don't get a drive letter for it. Use fdisk to delete and recreate all the partitions. Or in XP setup just tell it to format them, it'll give you the option.
 
fdisk doesnt assign drive letters anyways. they are not "hard wired" to the partition, windows does the letter assignment. in windows, you can change the drive letter yourself to whatever you want.
 
After I delete all the partitions, how can I install xp? will i have to change something in the bios? I don't know if the cd is bootable or not or do I have to create a boot disk. Don't I need a primary partition before I can install anything?
 
Yes, you will need at least one partition on your drive before you can use it.
One bootable primary should do.
 
For some reason fdisk only sees half of my drive. I have a 30 gig and it only sees 15gig. If I write zeros to the drive, will it fix the problem?
 
You can boot from the XP cd. You may have to go into your BIOS and change the boot order so that your computer looks to boot from the cd-rom before your hard drive. Also, in your case you would be just as well off to setup your hard drive in the setup for XP. You can partition your drive and format it either NTFS or FAT32.
 
yes, i dont see why you are bothering with fdisk, 2k/xp setup will allow you to partition and set up the disk .. much easier this way, more logical .. good luck ..
-neural
 
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