I have a question about Designate 
Your Own Drive Letters:


My problem is this: I have recently installed a 45GB harddisk and made these  5 partitions:
C: All Windows related stuff
D: All other program files
E: Documents
F: Documents
G: Mostly zipped backup for reïnstalls

I kept my old 2GB drive to store less used stuff on, but every time I connect this 
drive, it automatically gets drive letter D:, D: becomes E:, E: becomes F:, etc... 
messing up all program links!

This is quite annoying because any program I launch now searches unsuccesfully for 
its files on drive D: ...

I read designating drive letters in Win Me only works with drives controlled by drivers, 
but isn't there any way to make the second disk take the last drive letter (in my 
case H:) ?

All answers that could clear things up for me are highly appreciated..

Bram.

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Yeah you have a problem there. Unfortunately there is noway around this while using MS-Windows or MS-DOS. The first partition of every physical hard drive is loaded first in sucessive drive letters starting at drive C: then all other partitions are loaded starting with the partions on the first hard drive continuing onto the last. The way I have used for years to handle this "problem" (since I am constantly changing my drives) is this: 1) I leave drives C-F for physical drives 2) I use an old DOS utility {subst} to make directories look like drives which I have the AUTOEXEC.BAT file load on boot. subst G: c:\zgames (for games) subst H: c:\zdata (for data) subst I: c:\zinstall (for Installs and utilities) 3)I always set my CDROM drives to K-M 4)I always set my Network drives to N-R 5)I always set my VirtualCD drives to S-Z Keep in mind that this allows all hard drives to be one large partition only and makes it easy to move things around alot assuming you adjust your subst commands in your autoexec.bat file to specify the accual place of your "special" directories. This has always worked for me, but up until now the subst command has worked, this may change in the future and if it does I will be forced into looking to something like "PartitionMagic" or some other third party software to help me out. Hope this is of some use to you. Good Luck

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Hi Maxim,

Thanks for your suggested solution. I saved your response "in case that", but for now I'd rather leave the AUTOEXEC.BAT alone and live with the inconvenience.
Apparently there's no easy fix for it now, So I'll just hope Win 2002 will let you choose drive letters... -sigh-

Anyway, thanks for answering :)

Bram

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I've been useing the same exact method since I began using Win95, but I've recently upgraded to XP and i need to load the subst command before logging on (so that various programs and special folders, etc., get associated correctly), but I cannot find any "load before logon" typr option. Is there any work around, or am I looking in the wrong places? Thanks.


On Monday, October 8, 2001 at 6:44 pm, Maxim_dx wrote:
>Yeah you have a problem there. Unfortunately there is noway around this while using
>MS-Windows or MS-DOS.
>The first partition of every physical hard drive is loaded first in sucessive drive
>letters starting at drive C: then all other partitions are loaded starting with the
>partions on the first hard drive continuing onto the last.
>The way I have used for years to handle this "problem" (since I am constantly changing
>my drives) is this:
>
> 1) I leave drives C-F for physical drives
> 2) I use an old DOS utility {subst} to make directories look like drives which I
>have the AUTOEXEC.BAT file load on boot.
> subst G: c:\zgames (for games)
> subst H: c:\zdata (for data)
> subst I: c:\zinstall (for Installs and utilities)
> 3)I always set my CDROM drives to K-M
> 4)I always set my Network drives to N-R
> 5)I always set my VirtualCD drives to S-Z
>
>Keep in mind that this allows all hard drives to be one large partition only and
>makes it easy to move things around alot assuming you adjust your subst commands
>in your autoexec.bat file to specify the accual place of your "special" directories.
>
>This has always worked for me, but up until now the subst command has worked, this
>may change in the future and if it does I will be forced into looking to something
>like "PartitionMagic" or some other third party software to help me out.
>
>Hope this is of some use to you. Good Luck

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

On Friday January 18, 2002 I have found a soultion to the problem. I had installed a 40g hd partitioned in 5 parts and moved the original 6.8 partitioned in 4 parts to the slave position. I wanted my new faster drive to be assigned the first 5 letters and you know what happened. PC Magazine has a great article complete with an illustrative chart at http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0%2Caid%2C14872%2Cpg%2C2%2C00.asp Simply put, the second hd has to have all partitions as logical drives. No primary partition. This will accomplish what you are looking for. The only downfall with this is that the information on the original drive will be lost in the fdisk process. In my case that is not a problem because I have so much room on my new 40g. Easily enough to contain anything I want to save from my original 6.8g.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I'm not quite sure I understand what y'all are asking, but I did get subst to work in XP - went into my command prompt, then typed "subst /?" and learned how, then made it work. Anyway, maybe this is totally irrelevent :^) but thought I'd let y'all know.

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