Weird XP Pro HDD identification

[BarkingGhostar]

Morning All,

I have a number of WinXPpro hosts on my LAN. Let's say they run from AAA to FFF. On host AAA I had only Parallel ATA drives. This is on an Abit AA8 motherboard that is about five years old. Its one of the first LGA775 motherboards from Abit, and the Serial ATA controller is 3rd party (not Intel).

Anyway, today I connected a 1.5TB HDD on SATA1, and changed the motherboard options to use a combination of PATA and SATA drives. No problem in the BIOS and all physical disks are seen.

I went into Admin Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management and initialized the new HDD just like I would do any drive. I then proceeded to create a Primary partition and format it NTFS with drive letter X.

In My Computer, though, this new disk appears as being a network drive on another host (BBB). The drive letter identified locally is F, but for host BBB it is X. I have never seen where a local physical disk attached to an internal SATA connector is treated a) as a network drive, and b) for another host that wasn't even powered on the LAN.

Anyone seen this before?

 

[VirtualLarry]

There can be a problem with network drive letters overlapping local drive letters. This usually happens when you have a mapped network drive (to a certain letter), and then add local drives such that the local drive also becomes that letter. It's a bug in windows.