Remapping drive letters on physiocal HD's.

[uberlad]

Am I just being mad or is there no way in windows to remap the drive letter of a physical drive?

I have two hard drives, a 40Gb which is split into two 20Gb partitions, and a 3Gb I just picked up for backups of important data and stuff.

What I'd like is to be able to have the two big drives as C and D and the little one as E, or possibly even place it after the cd drives.

Is there a windows hack, or a app that'll do this for me? Or am I limited by the actual architecture of the machine here?

Ta guys,

Uberlad

[Dilitante1]

You are limited by your operating system. Win9X wont let you rearrainge the lettering on Drives. BUT if you have WinNT or Win2K you can change the drive letters in Drive Administrator.

As for a hack, I havent heard of any for Win9X...



best of luck......


-Dil

[arbymo]

something that might work

I tried this and sometimes it works, sometimes not.

Don't let the bios detect or select that you have the 2nd drive.
Just choose "none" in the 1st bios page for the drive in question.

When windows boots, the real mode kernel won't see this drive as it doesn't get int13 support for it from the bios, but when the GUI starts, the protected mode int13 support kicks in and see that drive and it'll be assigned a drive letter after all partitions on your 1st drive.

This method is some what tricky and doesn't work for all mobos/bios/drives, also you might need to repartion/reformat the drive on the same pc, and sometimes it won't work when you put the drive in another pc.

Another work around is to detect your drives normally in the bios, and then launch fdisk or whatever partitiong program you want to use and delete the primary partition from the 2nd drive, then create a secondary and logical partition on it. (no primary)

When the 1st drive exists, fdisk should let you make a logical partition on a 2nd drive w/o creating a primary.

If fdisk won't let you make logical partition on a drive w/o creating a primary partition on it, then you should look for other partitioning software like efdisk (free), partition magic, linux fdisk, NT disk manager and there r many others.

This is how dos and win9x assignes drive letters :

c: 1st primary on 1st drive
d: 1st primary on 2nd drive
e: 1st logical on 1st drive
f: 2nd logical on 1st drive
....
g: 1st logical on 2nd drive
h: 2nd logical on 2nd drive
....
i: 1st cd-rom

hope this help you; try it and let us know.

[Ali]

If you want to do a hack, you could map a drive letter such as z: to your little hard drive, then use tweakui to hide its other drive letter.

You could also make a batch file with subst d: z: and put that in your startup folder (or autoexec).

Not very tidy, but would probably work.

Ali

[Marshmallowman]

If you are willing to reformat and repartition your drives.
delete your all partions on both drives


create your first partition on your large drive
create an extended partition on the rest of large drive
then create an extended partition on your second small drive

I don't now much about partition magic and other such programs but would they be able to do what you want?

better still, go to win2000, it certainly makes playing around with partitions/logical drives a lot easier

[uberlad]

Thanks for the suggestions, I@ll have a fiddle this week, once I@ve been told I can wipe the old drive (may parents are still mak9ing sure that nothing was lost when their machine got transferred to a bigger drive)

I think I@ll see what my copy of partition magic can do with extended drives and stuff.

Uberlad

[MultimediaMan]

Yes, it's possible.

I think there is a small freeware program called Letter Assigner for Win9X:

http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/

There is another more powerful version for Win9X that is shareware available as well, but the URL escapes me...I'll post it when I locate it again.

[Psycho Logical]

This might help.

How to Prevent Drive Letters from Changing After You Add a Hard Disk or a CD-ROM