Changing Drive Letters

Looking for a easy way out. Is there a way to change a driveletter back.
My No.1 HD I have partitioned in C - D - E
40 GIG. I installed a older 6.4 GIG HD as my drive No.2 mainly to store Sound and Graphic Files on it. Problem is after Formatting the drive Windows gives it the drive letter D and that advances my previous D to E and E to F and poor old Windows can not find any programs anymore that are on the original D which is almost all. As I try to keep as little as possible on C except the OS. Is there a way of changing the Windows assigned Drive Letter, so that I don't have to change manually all my stuff that was assigned to D beforehand.
It just looked like a hell of a lot of trouble so for the time I pulled the No.2 drive out again and things are back to as it was. But I would love to install a second drive but without all that trouble of having to reassign everything.
Or should I take the risk and use Partition Magic and undo my Partitions back to just C drive and then Install the second HD and re-partition again after. The partitions were made with PM 8.
Windows 98 SE
I would like to hear some thoughts on this issue.
Thanks in advance.
hawk22

 

You formatted the second drive with a primary partition.

The second one should be formatted entirely as "Extended" then add Logical drives as required. Windows will then assign the drives as F:, G:, etc.

Use fdisk and make sure you change to the second drive before partition and format.

 

Hi Bill,
Thank you very much for your advice, I can't remember exactly how it was. I did try different formats I think I fdisked about 4 or 5 times and I think when I did as you recomend Windows gave me 800 MB as F:, and the rest of the 6.4 Gig drive was Unallocated and when I did try to make it bigger all it allowed me was 2.1 or 2.4 GIG.
I kind of wanted the whole of the 6.4 GIG as one drive or max. 2
I see that you are running 2 HD's so I guess that you are familiar with it, I would appreciate it very much if you could tell me a bit amore about the settings in the Formatting process I found it quite hairy at my first attempt.
And I know what you mean when you say make sure you are in Drive 2 as I nearly proceedet still beeing in Drive 1.
Exellent advice for any newbee.
One more question Bill if you don't mind I also see that you are running a 1.3 Gig Duron I am running at the moment a 900 Duron and I was wondering if it would be adviceable to upgrade to something like a Athlon 1.7 that is around the maximum that my mobo will allow me as I am planing to do some scanning including Slides and Negatives.
Thanks in advance Bill
hawk22

 

Hey Hawk22,

When you are in fdisk, you have 5 choices. #5 is change drive. This is so you are working on the right HDD.

If you want your second drive to be one drive, then create an extended partition and use 100% of the drive. Fdisk will then create one Logical drive (F. Reboot with the startup disk still in the floppy dive and go into fdisk again and select $4. This will tell you what partitions you have on both disks. Here you are just checking to see that fdisk did what you expected. If all is well then use format F:.

This should have you fixed up for drive letters.

I don't know if you would notice a big difference with the faster processor. My cousin has the same machine as I except he has an Athlon XP 1.6GHZ, Mine runs as fast as his does.

Maybe one of the hardware types here could chime with a recommendation?

 

If you have Partition Magic, you can to the floppies and in the Window that opens up go to the menu bar at the top and select the second hdd. Then select the primary partition, r-click and select format, be sure to chose the right file system and you want it to be a logical partition instead of a Primary. Now go ahead and run it. Save your self a hassel. Plus it is a lot quicker than fdisk/format from windows DOS. Yes the faster cpus do help, but dos can only go so fast.

 

Thank you very much Bill and Train;
Well this should give me some encouragement to have another go at it
Just one thing Bill as I remember I did try that but something must have gone haywire along the way.
What I did was :
A:\> fdisk enter
1. Create DOS Partition or Logical DOS drive enter
3. Create Logical DOS Drive in the extendet DOS Patition enter
Do you wish to use the maximum available size for a Primary DOS Partition and make the Partition active Y enter
re-start
I think that was the way I went obviously wrong.
This time I will have to delete the partition first.
Train, I did try PM 8 but it hang every time at 50% don't know why.
So Bill would you be able to set me straight on that track.
Thanks again Bill & Train
hawk22

 

First you have to get rid of all other partitions on the second drive. Delete the logicals, then the extended, then the primary.

Then from fdisk select 4 to see any partitions. It should say none exist.

Now from fdisk, choose "create extended partition" use 100% of the drive. Fdisk will tell you that you have no logical partitions. Create one using 100% of the drive.

Reboot with disk still in the floppy drive and, at the A:\ type format f:

Done. Your first drive will be c,d and e and your second drive will be f:.

For the future, you always have to delete all partitions starting with logical, then extended, then primary.

 

Also, with fdisk, to make it all logical, you do have to have the other hdd hooked up to the computer.

Which version of PM do you have PM8.0 and probably PM7.0 would handle that. Format the darn thing as NT, Linux first. Then reformat it to what you want and change it to logical.

 

Train & Bill,
Thanks; sorry I am laging a bit.
I have been following the thread in the Windows 98 Forum with Liz, and I have been taking lots of Notes and your input Train is quite substancial I am learning a lot looking at and copying lots of info from the many links that have been posted.
When I have digestet some of that information than I will be back with a question on the cabling of my HD's as my mobo is a IWill with Raid but I am not using Raid and the Install Floppy is needet to disable Raid when connecting the IDE Ribbon or Ribbons to the ATA 100 IDE connectors on the mobo I also have a PCI controller installed.
But I will be back with more details when I have opened the Case and see where things are now.
For the moment thanks agaim Bill and Train.
hawk22

 

I will give you a idea of my setups. Yes 3 computers.

IDE
Cdrom - Master - primary ide
Cdrw - Master - secondary IDE

ATA100 or 133 card [2 have the ata100, onboard] the other has the ATA133 PCI adapter card.

C: - Master on Primary
D: - Master on secondary

As you can see, I can add 4 more ide devices. And on occation , I do add a couple hdds that are setup as backups.
Do suggest keepint the cdroms, cdrw, and dvd types on the IDE.

The M$ link of fdisk and fromat is 32 pages if you print it all out. Yes, I did it too.