Hard Drive Letter Question

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Most people know that disk volumes using the FAT file system under DOS and its derivative operating systems are accessed using drive letters, such as C:, D: and so on. However, it can be a bit confusing figuring out how these letters are determined. Of course, as you use more disks (and other devices) and more partitions, this can get even more difficult to understand. A common confusion encountered by someone upgrading their PC is adding a hard disk to it and finding that suddenly some their files have moved from D:, say, to E:. This happens because DOS assigns drive letters using a specific sequence when the PC is booted. Drive letters are not permanently assigned to the drive, and so adding new hard disk volumes can interrupt the previous order.

Drive letters A: and B: are reserved for floppy disks. The first disk, as determined by the physical and/or BIOS configuration of the drives is A:, and the second disk is B:. Even if there is only one floppy disk in the system, B: is still reserved for use by floppies and cannot be used for any other purpose.

Hard disks are lettered starting from C:, with each partition getting a separate letter. It is essential to realize that DOS will first assign a letter to all primary DOS partitions on all hard disks in the system, before it will assign any letters to any logical DOS volumes (in extended DOS partitions) on any hard disk. This is the primary reason why adding a hard disk to an existing system can cause drive letters to shift.

Let's take an example system that contains a single 1.2 GB hard disk broken into three partitions. The first partition is the DOS primary, and then an extended partition is defined containing the other two partitions as logical volumes. The primary partition will be C:, and the other two D: and E:. Now let's say we add a second hard disk that has two partitions itself, one primary and the other logical (extended). When the system is booted up with the new hard disk in it, the first hard disk's primary partition will still be C:, but the primary partition in the second hard disk will grab D:. Then the extended partitions will be assigned letters. The result is that the logical partitions on the first hard disk will have their letters shift.

Having drive letters change is not only confusing, it can cause programs to malfunction, because many programs record what disk and directory they are in and expect that they will remain stationary (which stinks, but hey, that's life.)

There is one relatively simple way to avoid having this happen: don't create a primary partition on any hard disks in the system other than the first one. It is perfectly legal to only create an extended partition on a hard disk, and put all of the partitions in it. The only place that a primary partition is absolutely needed is on the first hard disk, because it is required to boot the operating system. You cannot normally boot from an extended partition volume anyway (although some motherboards will apparently let you).

Note: One other minor consideration is that you lose a small amount of disk space if you create only extended partitions on a disk. The extended partition will begin using (logical) cylinder 1 of the disk, and therefore you lose the space in cylinder 0. This will generally cost you a handful of megabytes of storage, but is pretty much unavoidable if you want your partitions in a sensible order.

So in the example above, if our second hard disk had its two partitions both defined as logicals, then they would have been assigned F: and G:, and the partitions on the first disk would have been unchanged. This is in fact the way you will normally want to partition second and third hard disks in a system. What if you are adding a hard disk from another system that has already been set up with a primary partition? Unless you don't care about the second hard disk's primary partition being assigned D:, you have to delete the primary partition (after copying any data from it of course!) and expand the size of the extended partition to take its place. For a job of this sort, a utility like Partition Magic is indispensable. Otherwise you will basically have to wipe the second disk clean and start over.

Once all of the hard disk partitions have been assigned drive letters, the system will allocate letters for other devices that are operated using drivers. Devices like CD-ROMs, Zip drives, etc. are operated through software drivers that present the device to the operating system as if they were a disk, and then they are assigned a drive letter so they can be accessed. Normally, these devices are assigned a letter immediately after the last one used by hard disks, but this can be changed by using different parameters for the driver software. For example, the drive letter for a CD-ROM drive under Windows 95 can be set in software using the Device Manager.

Finally, some software programs can change drive letters. A very common example is the use of disk compression agents such as DriveSpace. These will often take a hard disk, say D:, change its letter to something out of the way like R:, create a compressed volume on R:, and then map the compressed volume back to D:. The net result is that the disk is compressed while appearing to still be uncompressed.
 
drive mapper can fix things for you. but you are better off reformatting and make sure you are paying attention to the drive on the format screen. this is where everybody pick the wrong letter for the partition
 
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