Thanks for pointing out the KB article, Bill, although I'm no stranger to the
drive lettering scheme.  :)  You wouldn't know it, though, from the mistake in
my original post -- NT is indeed on primary 3.  I had tried it both ways, and
ended up leaving it on a primary, rather than on an extended as I had written.
That's the only way it could be drive letter N in my system.  Otherwise, since
the last logical is L, it would have to be M -- or it would have to be living
on primary 1 (the second primary).  But it doesn't.  It lives on primary 2.

Nonetheless, you appear to be right, in that hiding the other primaries on boot
with SC (BTW, I agree with you 100 percent that System Commander is a fantastic
tool, well worth the price of admission.) is the only way to avoid DCMode.
That's not such a hardship, I guess, since I can leave the extended and its
logicals visible as I wish, or I can control whether the other systems can see
them via TweakUI.  It's only the primaries that seem to cause the problem, and
only on the two Win95 systems.  NT is okay.  It sees everything correctly, even
if the other primaries are visible.

Speaking of which, what would be your advice regarding NT?  Since it's okay as
is, would you bother to hide the other two primaries?  Not hiding them from NT,
as I do now, results in NT's root file system being assigned drive letter N,
which is the correct letter, and NT seems quite happy with that.  But if I hide
the other primaries, NT will assign drive C to its root, I'm guessing, and
there's some potential for registry settings and such to come into conflict
after such a reassignment, yes?  Or am I just paranoid?  :))

As far as Windows95 and its flakiness goes, it is indeed living on the first
primary -- primary 0 -- on the first drive, so that's not what is causing the
problem.  It's simply the problem (as you say, bug) of it detecting another
primary.  Oddly, it doesn't care if there is a third primary, it's the second
one that makes it lose its mind.  Only one drive ends up in DCMode when there
are three primaries, and it's always the second primary created that causes
this.  Hiding the second primary causes Windows to think the third primary is
the second, and it then gives that primary the DCMode "treatment."  :(

Japanese Windows95 is even stranger.  It assigns itself drive C as it should,
then assigns a phantom drive M as it detects primary 0, similarly to English
Windows, and NT ends up on drive N again.  But then the fun begins.  The
3-cdrom jukebox get phantom letters O, P, and Q, even though those drives have
been assigned as X, Y, and Z -- permanently.  So where does the actual root for
English Windows show up?  You guessed it: drive R.  The only way to stop the
madness is to hide the two primaries, but even then, maniacally, the three
phantom cdrom drives still exist.

Well, I've rambled enough about this.  No one else seemed to want to tackle the
issue, and it may very well be that masking is the only answer.  Too bad.  I
kind of liked the completely open system.  I guess that's one reason why I
think Linux is so great.  It mounts and reads every drive on all for systems
without any mistakes or any funny business.

Thanks again.  (I trimmed a bit below, and BTW, I *hate* you for having five
SCSI drives!)  :))

Lance

On Sat, 02 May 1998 05:50:52 -0400, in article
<[log in to unmask]>, Bill C. wrote:

>The way drive letters are assigned is described in the KB article
><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. 

>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.