From: "Ethan Matthews" :Sent: Saturday, August 11, 2001 3:57 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Forcing Slave Drive to Be Drive J Instead of D


> This is a continuation of a situation outlined in a previous thread,
> "[PCBUILD] FAT32 Not Present":
> 
> > Message-ID: <[log in to unmask]>
> >
> > My friend, whose computer I'm "technically" responsible for has had
> > recent problems booting up.  Originally this thing was an eMachine
> > eTower 400i, and as far as most of the guts are concerned it still
> > is.  I've simply moved it all into a new case after the machine kept
> > shutting itself down before due to the legendary faulty power supply
> > installed in most eMachine computers.
> >
> > So ever since moving it over I've been seeing a lot of blue screens
> > saying the computer is unable to write to Drive C, in addition to
> > frequent system lockups to the point that the task manager cannot
> > even be brought up.
> 
> To insert a segue, we decided to simply replace the hard drive with a new
> Maxtor 30.7 gig drive, which, BTW, is not yet working because I think the
> motherboard is fried, too.  We're replacing the motherboard, RAM and CPU
> tomorrow.
> 
> I took the old 4.3 gig and stuck it in my own PC as a slave, thinking it
> would be a perfect place to archive and categorize old e-mail until I'm
> ready to burn them to and fill up a CD with each category of e-mail.
> 
> When I installed this drive as slave, it rudely snuggled itself right past
> Drive C, moving all my other drives down a letter.  This would normally be
> no problem, but I have many directories and files referenced on Drive D and
> now everything is out of whack.  Yes, I can go through and fix this, but it
> would take a lot longer than simply forcing this slave drive to be Drive J
> so my master drive can continue to be drives C,D,E,F,G,H and I.
> 
> Now here's what I've tried so far.  I tried going to the Control Panel |
> System | Device Manager | Disk Drives | (the slave drive) | Properties |
> Settings and the Reserved Drive Letters were greyed out whether Removable
> was checked or unchecked.  Therefore I could not change it.
> 
> I then tried going through the Registry.  I went to:
> 
>   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\ESDI\GENERIC_IDE_DISK_TYPE47_
> 
> I changed the CurrentDriveLetterAssignment on the master drive to CDEFGHI.
> I changed the CurrentDriveLetterAssignment on the slave drive to J.
> 
> I rebooted.
> 
> I still found the slave drive as Drive D. :-(
> 
> Any ideas on what to try next?  More info follows which may help narrow down
> the solution:
> 
> 
> Here's my AUTOEXEC.BAT
> 
> SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330  T6
> SET CTSYN=C:\WINDOWS
> C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\SBLIVE\DOSDRV\SBEINIT.COM
> SET PATH=C:\PROGRA~1\TEXTUT~1\ULTRAE~1;%PATH%
> SET PATH=%PATH%;C:\PROGRA~1\NETWOR~1\PGP
> 
> 
> And here's my CONFIG.SYS
> 
> DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
> DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE
> 
> 
> System Hardware/Software follows:
> 
> snipped for brevity

Ethan,

The reason that the 4.3 GB hard drive took the drive letter "D" is that is partitioned as a primary partition.  Primary partitions always get drive letters before logical drives in the extended partition.  If you reformat the drive an extended partition only,  then the drive letter will move to the end of the drive letters.  You can also use a program like Partition Magic to change the partition from primary to extended.  

Mary Wolden

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