Windows drive letter allocation

[Zed808]

Gents,

I was wondering if any of you had come across a problem that i'm having with WindowsME (although i do not think it is operating system specific), where the drive letters for my internal Zip drive & my Raid Array (strip) keep on swaping around. This is really annoying as you may well guess. Has anyone else come across this or does anyone know a work around for this issue.

I have tried (in vain) to find out about how drive letter allocation works in Windows, but it appears to be at the DOS level. As WinME has removed this part, does anyone know how this allocation process works?

The boxes for drive letter allocation in system->properties are grayed out...i would think this means it is automatic..??? Please could i get some help as to where to even look for a solution.

Cheers all

Z

 

[sechs]

What kind of hardware to which are these things attached? What other drives do you have?

In general, I would expect Windows to assign drive letters to SCSI/RAID volumes before removables.

 

[Zed808]

The motherboard is K7A-RAID. I have two ATA drives attached to IDE1 as master & slave. I have a DVD & Zip100 on IDE2 and then two ATA drives in a strip RAID on the onboard HP-RAID.

The problem lies with Zip100 and ATA-RAID swapping letters e: & f:

There is no reason for them to swap like this as far as i can tell.

Z

 

[sechs]

I'm guessing that sometimes the Zip initializes before the RAID, and sometimes it's the other way around, so they get assigned letters in different orders. I'm really at a loss as to how to fix this in Windows ME; in Win2k or WinXP, this would be easy.

Are there any options in Iomegaware to set the drive letter for the Zip?

 

[Zed808]

I haven't actually got Iomegaware installed as the zip-drive was OEM and ME found it no problems. Do you think if i were to download this software and install in would possibly fix? I will give a try non-the-less...but was looking into the BIOS and i am offered no control their either...

Just for curiosity, how would i have fixed this in Win2000 or XP. If worst happens i could migriate to these OSs.

Thanks for the info.

Z

 

[sechs]

I recall Iomegaware having a drive letter setting option. Given, that this was some time ago, it may no longer have that option.

On Win2k or WinXP you can reassign the drive letter for any volumes, except the boot and system volumes, via the disk manager.