Drive letter assignments - Lockable?

Systems:

Old Machine: AMD 850 Slot A Based gigabyte, 256m Ram, with win98se. IDE only... yea, is small slow and overcrowded... but still works just fine. Built in 1999.

New machine: AMD A64 based GA-K8N-Pro-SLI, 1g, XP Pro, 2 Raptor 74s...
Drives currently setup as follows:
No IDE HDs only the CDRW on IDE1... nothing yet on IDE2...
1st SATA Raptor; Partition 1 as 1 30 some Gig currently assigned C by XP and is XPs OS location, Partition 2 as 40 some gig currently assigned D by XP and is Programs.
2nd SATA Raptor; 1 partition 70 some gig cuurently asigned E by XP for data.
CDRW is F:


I want to add in a fat 32'ed 80g IDE for critical data files backup... so as to be transferable/installable to the older win98 backup machine if needed. (no, the two machines are not "netted "... nor will they ever be...)

This 80g IDE is new and the drive I used as a temporary system building drive before I got the SATAs to work and currently is one NTFS partition with an earlier install of XP... now not connected. I want to reconnect it on this XP (and not boot which I can control from Bios) and delete its partion and reformat to the three fat 32 partitions mentioned above (maybe one partition..see below). But before I do this I want to lock my current C D and E assignments... on the SATAs. How does one do this so they can not be reassined no matter what other dirives are installed later... unless unlocked first? I plan also to have hard coded Drive paths in scripts for backups at certian times.

I may have to do just one fat 32 partition instead of three at whatever my old win98 machine's cmos will see the drive as... may only see it as a 32gig due to win98 limitations... I do not think 98 will see 80g. Does anyone know if it will see multiple "less than 32g" partitions on it (if the CMOS sees it as a 80g... which it may not... then this question is mute)?

Maybe better to just connect this IDE straight to the win 98 without deleteting the NTFS partition first? Can 98 delete the NTFS or wont it see any partions on it and think it raw...? In that case I'll just reformat it on the old machine to whatever its CMOS will see it as. Then add it into the new XP machine... but still need to lock the new machine's SATA drives assignments 1st.

What do you think? Thanks;

Dave
Hillsboro, Ohio

 

Hi Dave,

You can assign drive letters withTweakUI http://windowsxp.mvps.org/tweakui.htm and that should lock them. Even if it doesn't after adding the 80 gig ATA, easy to re assign drive letters.

From my days running 9X - WinME, fdisk can create up to 80. If any problems with fdisk http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=263044 a fix from MS. XP will not create a FAT32 partition greater than 32 gigs - so have to use fdisk and do it on the 98 system, fdisk doesn't run on XP.

98 can't see NTFS partitions.

Regards - Charles