At 12:00 PM 9/24/2002, Demetri Kolokotronis wrote: >I am transferring data from a three-partition drive, mounted as slave, to >another three-partition drive. Drive letters on master drive were C, D, E >as single. When second drive was mounted as slave, master drive's letters >became C, E, F, and second drive's letters became D, G, H. > >When I finish transferring data, and dismount slave, will former master >drive, now single, change from C, E, F to C, D, E, as wanted, or do I >have to do something? > >Cloning drive was not an option, as wanted fresh install of Win98 OS and >selective transferring. In a Win98 operating system, the drive letters will return to your C,D,E configuration. The slave drive you have copied all the files to will also become this same configuration in a different Win98 machine... you will only need to set the C partition as active with Fdisk... Now, with that said, Windows2000 and WindowsXP is a whole different matter, especially WindowsXP. Recently, I pulled a 20gig C drive out of a WindowsXP Pro system, (it had gone bad). I had an old 6gig drive handy, so I stuck it in there temporarily, (the system had a 40gig D drive). So, now I have a primary master unformatted 6gig drive and the 40gig formatted drive with tons of data. I put in my WindowsXP Pro Cd and began the install process to the 6gig drive, remember it is the primary master. Windows recognized that it was unformatted, it gave me the option to format it and install the operating system to this drive. I went ahead and choose this option began the install. Now, I was not watching too carefully, I have installed Windows so many times it is rather boring... anyway, ultimately the system put my Primary Slave drive, the old D drive as the C drive, it put the CD Rom which was the E drive to the D drive and my new Primary Master became the E drive... and the operating system is installed to it. Since this is my home entertainment center's media PC, I was not to worried about it, at least so far. It seems to work fine. I tried to change the drive letters in the Administrative Tools, but it would only allow me to change the drive letters of the C & D drives... my new E drive could not be changed as it contains the operating system. Odd, but it works... *wink* Bob Wright The NoSpin Group Visit our website regularly for FAQs, articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more http://freepctech.com