On 17 Oct 2002, at 23:32, Michael A. Wosnick wrote:

> Therefore, I want to partition the new drive into at least a few partitions
> (e.g. now I assume they will be logical drives I, J, K etc) and do a clean
> install of WinXP onto the first of these new partitions (drive I in this
> example),

  I don't believe this is going to work as simply as you think.

  The hard drive partition table has room for FOUR entries.  In order to
have more than 4 volumes (drive letters), one or more of these must be an
"Extended DOS" partition containing multiple "logical volumes".  These
however cannot be bootable -- a bootable partition must be one of the four
"real" partitions on the drive.

  If you partition your new drive as one real bootable partition and an
extended DOS partition containing multiple volumes, Windows will by default
assign the real partition drive letter D: and "bump" your existing D:-H:
partitions by one letter -- which will make any paths to them, such as in
environment variables or batch files, break.

  This Disk Manager utility included with NT/2K/XP can be used to reassign
drive letters and so "repair" this configuration, but this approach is less
than perfect.  The drive letters will be assigned as above early in the boot
process, and then will change as the disk-management component of the OS
loads.

David Gillett

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