association of drives [to drive letters]

assoc.

AH HA, success. I did the disk management suggestion with the help of Seagate and am up and running exactly the way I wanted. I'm gonna mark this one up on the wall. Yes, NTFS. I wound up doing what all have suggested and I want to thank everyone that had answers. Now, we'll see how long it takes me to muck it up. Ahhhh, another of life's little successes. Zeek. ....... PS, "Free Agent Pro" model# ; ST 305004 PFA 1E2-RK, is the drive in question.

 

Ok, thanks for the end of the saga Glad you got it working.

 

It all goes back to dos ( or perhaps earlier)
When you set up windows windows will set up the drives it finds in alphabetical sequence
The original boot drives were either a or b from diskettes
c is given to the cd rom which in most cases is the drive from which windows is installed from
from there is sequential to the drives it finds
That includes built in card readers
When you plug in the external hard drive windows will give it the next letter
You can change the name - however I do not think it is something at this stage in your computer "career" you want to add to the mix
Just plug in the external drive and let it install
You will see the drive just as if was a hard drive installed on your computer

 

Er, are you sure? Sorry, I don't want to be pedantic and pick you up on the C:/ part, but Zeek seemed confused enough (no offence Zeek) without having to worry about incorrect information about how DOS and Windows allocate drive letters!

C:/ was, is, and probably will be for the foreseeable future, the system drive. At least until they do away completely with those awful bloody FDD's! Even then they will probably reserve A:/ (and probably B:/) for USB "pen" drives or something.

If memory serves me correct, I think DOS used to allocate D:/ as a "RAM Disk" and you had to manually install a driver for a CDROM, which would then invariably end up as E:/. Actually, thinking about it, I think the RAM Disk was only if you used a DOS boot disk to get the machine up and running to use something like FDISK, in which case a CDROM would've been allocated to D:/.

It is all such a long time ago though, and I was young and often intoxicated back then!!

Andy.