Determining order of drives

Usually when I format a hard drive and partition it, all the logical
partitions are in sequence, i.e C, D, E, F before the CD drives etc kick in
on the end.

However, with a new PC I have built, they kick in after C drive with my
remaining logical drives starting F (I have two drives).

The only differences I can tell a
a) This time I have created about 10 logical drives (my new PC has a large
hard drive).
b) Its a SATA drive. Different connections etc.

Would any of those account for the different way the drives are lined up?
How do I change them back?

Thanx.

AMO

In message , AMO
writes
Usually when I format a hard drive and partition it, all the logical
partitions are in sequence, i.e C, D, E, F before the CD drives etc kick in
on the end.

However, with a new PC I have built, they kick in after C drive with my
remaining logical drives starting F (I have two drives).

The only differences I can tell a
a) This time I have created about 10 logical drives (my new PC has a large
hard drive).
b) Its a SATA drive. Different connections etc.

Would any of those account for the different way the drives are lined up?
How do I change them back?

Right click "My Computer" - Manage - Disk Management (win2k, xp is
similar)

You can assign drive letters there.

"AMO" NoSpam@SpamFreeWorld wrote in message
...
Usually when I format a hard drive and partition it, all the logical
partitions are in sequence, i.e C, D, E, F before the CD drives etc kick
in on the end.

However, with a new PC I have built, they kick in after C drive with my
remaining logical drives starting F (I have two drives).

The only differences I can tell a
a) This time I have created about 10 logical drives (my new PC has a large
hard drive).
b) Its a SATA drive. Different connections etc.

Earlier versions of Windows (pre XP) grouped all the fixed-disk physical
partitions together followed by all the fixed-disk logical partitions. That
was then followed by the removable drives.

So a PC with three HDDs, some of which have logical partitions, will be
ordered as follows:

Disk 1 C = physical; F = logical

Disk 2 D = physical

Disk 3 E = physical; G = logical 1; H = logical 2

I = CD drive

I think that SCSI drives are listed (in order of SCSI ID) before IDE drives:
if there'd been two SCSI drives in the above example, they would have been C
and D, and the IDE drives would have been E - J.

I think unpluggable drives (eg Compact Flash drives plugged in by USB) are
listed after hard-wired IDE removable drives - ie after the CD and Zip
drives.

I'm not sure whether the rule is the same for XP - probably.


Would any of those account for the different way the drives are lined up?
How do I change them back?

With Win 9x I think you couldn't change the order. With Win XP (and maybe
Win 2K) there is an option in Disk Manager to change the drive letter:

Control Panel | Admin Tools | Computer Management | Disk Management,
right-click on disk | Change Drive Letter

On Fri, 20 May 2005 21:41:45 +0100, AMO wrote:

Usually when I format a hard drive and partition it, all the logical
partitions are in sequence, i.e C, D, E, F before the CD drives etc kick in
on the end.

However, with a new PC I have built, they kick in after C drive with my
remaining logical drives starting F (I have two drives).

The only differences I can tell a
a) This time I have created about 10 logical drives (my new PC has a large
hard drive).
b) Its a SATA drive. Different connections etc.

Would any of those account for the different way the drives are lined up?
How do I change them back?

Thanx.

AMO

Just curious: why do you need *10* logical drives? That seems rather a
lot.

On Sat, 21 May 2005 12:25:55 GMT, Vincent Vega
wrote the following to uk.comp.misc:


Just curious: why do you need *10* logical drives? That seems rather a
lot.

With FAT16 file systems (as used by versions of Windows before Win95 OSR2
and DOS) there were fairly small limits on how big a partition could be (4
GB, although NT4 allowed bigger ones) and the cluster size was something
pretty daft like 32 KB on drives 1 GB - 2 GB, and 64 KB on drives 2 GB - 4
GB, which meant that a lot of space was wasted. With advent of FAT32, the
maximum drive size increased to 2 TB and a cluster size of 8 KB on drives up
to 8 GB, and 16 KB on drives up to 60 GB. On NTFS the clusters are even
smaller and the maximum drive size is even bigger. Having a bigger partition
also carries a performance overhead, but on most recent machines it's not as
noticeable as it used to be.

The main reason for having multiple partitions is to work around the old
limitations of FAT16, but there are other reasons such as keeping different
types of file (programs, games, OS or whatever) separate. Have only the OS
on one partition and you can easily reformat it without wiping out your MP3
collection when you want to reinstall or switch from, say, WinXP to Linux.

As far as clusters go, a cluster is a bit like a page in a book. You can
only have one subject (or file) on a page, but a subject can take up more
than one page. Any blank space left on the page is wasted. This is called
slack space. A short topic on an A6 page doesn't leave much slack space, but
putting it on an A1 page leaves a lot. I freed up about a GB when I
converted an 8 GB drive from FAT16 to NTFS.

If you have a subject that fills up 5 pages, but you only have one group of
3 and another of 2, you can split it up and put "continued on page x" at the
bottom. It works, but it takes a bit longer to get all the bits of the
subject. This is fragmentation. Defragmenting involves rearranging the book
so that each page of the subject is next to each other. The index (file
allocation table or master file table) tells you where everything is.

mh.
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