W'98 SE drive letters-->

reddog4629 · 02-23-2002, 04:07 PM

I have a 40GB(2 X 20GB) Raid0 machine partitioned for drive c and d. I added another 60GB drive as master and cdrw as slave on IDE channel 1. I fdisk and formatted this drive ok but windows assigned it letter d and now my second partition is drive e and I don't want to change all my shortcuts. My question is-Is there an easy way to re-assign my drive letters?

PresterJohn · 02-23-2002, 04:50 PM

you will need to fdisk and reformat that 2nd drive again.

the reason why this happened is this: primary DOS partitions are initialized before extended partitions. when you fdisk'ed that new drive, you created a primary partition on it. then when windows booted up, it found the 1st primary partition and initialized that as C:. next it then found the 2nd primary partition (on the new drive) and promptly assigned that as D: afterwards, it initialized the 1st extended partition (what used to be your d: drive) and assigned it as e: (and so forth)

if you were using nt, w2k, or xp, reassigning drive letters would be a snap. you will either have to fdisk & format again or use a disk partitioning utility to do this without destroying any exisiting data on that new drive.

reddog4629 · 02-23-2002, 05:13 PM

Fdisk won't let me creat an extended partition without a primary.
How do I do this?

Inanis · 02-23-2002, 05:18 PM

Would Partition Magic help him in this situation?

reddog4629 · 02-23-2002, 05:22 PM

I have used PM before and it scared the hell outta me.

Any other ideas?

PresterJohn · 02-23-2002, 05:25 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by reddog4629
Fdisk won't let me creat an extended partition without a primary.
How do I do this?

sure it will. make sure you delete ALL the partitions first. then select #2 on the fdisk menu (if my memory is right)

i think pm would work...though i've never had to use it in exactly this manner.

krohnjw · 02-23-2002, 05:25 PM

Have you tried it lately? I used PM 5.0.1, which was never released AFAIK, but kind of supported win 2k. It scared me too, it was slow and ran through everything like was goign to crash, had to reboot a bunch of times.

BUT, Pm 7 is a LOT better. I have no hesitation using it to do certain things now. They have made it a lot more reliable along with more user friendly IMO.

reddog4629 · 02-23-2002, 05:29 PM

Fdisk will not let me create an extended partition without first creating a primary-I tried it after deleting the primary and starting over.
Talking about the new drive.

Inanis · 02-23-2002, 05:32 PM

Ive been thinking . ..

And I think its just the nature of DOS/Win9x and the primary/extended partitioning system . . .

All the primaries are listed first, then all the extended partitions . .. . . Thats just the way it is.

I know you can change it on WinNT/2k/XP and such, but they use a POSIX-like approach at the OS level to talk to drives, so they can assign any letter they want to any drive . . .

reddog4629 · 02-23-2002, 05:38 PM

It's my son's machine and he is getting prepared to live with it.

Just kinda leaves a funny taste in my mouth-know what I mean?