It's actually a little more complicated than that, because the assignment
of drive letters is to *partitions*, not to drives.  But the basic concept
is essentially correct:  The BIOS assigns letters to partitions in a certain
order.
  Under Windows 95/98/ME, you can assign CD-ROM and Zip drives specific
letters out of this sequence.
  Windows NT/2K/XP include a "Disk Manager" Utility which also lets you
reassign letters to hard drive partitions.  I'm not sure you can change C:,
although I do have an NT server here on which the BIOS and NT disagree about
which drive is C:(!).
  And when you mount a shared drive/folder from another computer on the
network, you can assign it any unused letter.  It's common in small-to-
medium companies to find that letters in the S:-Z: range refer consistently
to the same shared volumes across all workstations, regardless of what (and
how many) letters a given machine uses for local storage devices.

David Gillett


On 7 Aug 2004 at 2:18, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> In a message dated 08/06/2004 7:00:56 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> << (This may sound dumb, but how does my system know what letters to give the
>  new hard drive when I tell it to format and partition and all that?  It's
>  sort of like chicken and egg time to me.)
>   >>
> Diane the system assigns drive letters by where the drive is
> attached and whether its a master or slave position. I believe it
> goes C: primary master D: secondary master E: primary slave
> F: secondary slave.
>
> Dennis Dittmar
> Maspeth NY 11378
>
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