At 13:12 01-05-98 +0900, Lance wrote:
>Quad Boot: Windows95 English (on the EIDE primary) [FAT 16]
>Windows95 Japanese (a second EIDE primary) [FAT 16]
>NT4.0 Workstation (on an EIDE extended logical) [FAT 16]
>Red Hat Linux 5.0 (on the SCSI extended logical) [EXT2]
>Using both System Commander & Partition Magic
>
>Windows95 English is spread over logicals out to
>drive L -- on the SCSI drive.
>
>Win95-J has only one drive, which is lettered correctly as
>drive M from within Win95-E.  It also shows correctly
>as drive C when booting into W95-J. (Remember, it's a
>primary partition.)
>
>The problem is that when *any* additional primary is created,
>Win95-E correctly assigns it drive letter M, but immediately
>puts that drive into DOS compatibility mode... Now, strangely,
>ADDITIONAL primary creations do NOT cause additional problems.

The way drive letters are assigned is described in the KB article
"Order in Which MS-DOS and Windows 95 Assigns Drive Letters" at
<http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q51/9/78.asp>.
According to this article, Win95 should support up to four
primary partitions on each hard drive. But I believe you are
seeing a bug in Win95.

I have been in your position. I found that although Win95 will
"tolerate" having more than one primary partition on a hard drive,
flakey things can begin to happen. Maybe this happens because the
first primary partition detected on the hard drive is not the
partition that Win95 is booted from. In other words, when you
boot Win95 using System Commander from the second primary partition
on drive one, Win95 (which is at this time in real MSDOS mode)
assigns this drive letter C. And it detects the first primary
partition on drive one only after detecting all the other partitions
(see the above KB article). At this time the partition is in MSDOS
mode. However, when Win95 goes to load the protected mode drivers,
it sees the order of the primary partitions differently. Maybe it
misses the first primary partition, leaving it in MSDOS Mode. If a
similar problem happens for the other hard drives, it might also
occur when Win95 switches from real to protected mode.

IF this theory is correct, a possible solution might be to have Win95
on the first parition of the first drive. Maybe you have Win95-J on
this first partition and that's why it works correctly. (Or do you
have WinNT on the first primary partition?) This problem does not
happen with WinNT.

The solution that works for me is to use System Commander to hide
the other primary partitions from Win95's sight. I have it set
so that System Commander hides my Win NT4 (FAT16) boot partition and
Win98 (FAT16) boot partition from Win95's sight. (You do this using
the System Commander advanced menus (use <Alt> key), accessed before
booting *any* operating system.) And I hide the Win95 and WinNT4
boot partitions from Win98 when Win98 is running. (I never checked
to see if this was necessary.) I don't bother hiding anything from
WinNT4. This feature of System Commander is one of things that sets
it apart from it's competitors.

This is not a hardship for me since I have five SCSI drives and all
the operating systems can access all the partitions on the last
four (non-boot) drives, which only have logical drives anyway.
(Drive letters going out to R, then optical drive and CDROM drives.)

Regards,
Bill