Win2000 partitioning
Discussion
Right - long story but finally managed to rebuild my desktop.
For various reasons I have a plethora of partitions on my primary drive and a couple on my seconday drive. Those on the primary are supposed to be C: (system), D:, E: (boot), F:, G:, P:.
On the secondary we have H: and I:.
Somehow the PC is now convince that D: is now the first partition on H:, thus screwing up all the partition letters on the primary disk (including therefore the boot partition). How on earth do I relabel it correctly? I can go in to disk manager, but after a reboot it just reverts back (and anyhow - I can't relabel the boot partition!).
:
For various reasons I have a plethora of partitions on my primary drive and a couple on my seconday drive. Those on the primary are supposed to be C: (system), D:, E: (boot), F:, G:, P:.
On the secondary we have H: and I:.
Somehow the PC is now convince that D: is now the first partition on H:, thus screwing up all the partition letters on the primary disk (including therefore the boot partition). How on earth do I relabel it correctly? I can go in to disk manager, but after a reboot it just reverts back (and anyhow - I can't relabel the boot partition!).
:
No idea how you managed to get D: as the 2nd partition of the primary drive, as Windows insists on labelling the 1st partition on each hard disk in alphabetic order and then going back to label other partitions once its been through all the discs.
Unless you have other operating systems that you want to boot from, I find it a better bet to have just one large partition on each physical drive and use the directory structure to logically separate files. This means all of your files have access to the maximum available free space on the disc, rather than each partition running out of space...
If you still need to have "virtual" disk drives with their own drive letters (as I do, in order to replicate on my home PC the drive structure I have on my work machine - makes moving development projects between the 2 that much easier!), you can make use of the DOS "subst" command to assign a drive letter to a folder.
>> Edited by pdV6 on Monday 10th January 10:32
Unless you have other operating systems that you want to boot from, I find it a better bet to have just one large partition on each physical drive and use the directory structure to logically separate files. This means all of your files have access to the maximum available free space on the disc, rather than each partition running out of space...
If you still need to have "virtual" disk drives with their own drive letters (as I do, in order to replicate on my home PC the drive structure I have on my work machine - makes moving development projects between the 2 that much easier!), you can make use of the DOS "subst" command to assign a drive letter to a folder.
>> Edited by pdV6 on Monday 10th January 10:32
pdV6 said:
No idea how you managed to get D: as the 2nd partition of the primary drive, as Windows insists on labelling the 1st partition on each hard disk in alphabetic order and then going back to label other partitions once its been through all the discs.
Not strictly true - letters are allocated to each primary partition in turn, but the first partition on each disc does not necessarily have to be a primary one. So on a PC with a multi-partition (primary + extended/logical) primary drive and a secondary drive containing only an extended partition with one or more logical drives, all the partitions on the primary drive will be allocated letters before any of the secondary drive partitions.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/234048/ gives the official description of the process...
And that only applies to the default allocation of drive letters - once the drives and Windows are installed, Disk Management can be used to alter the allocation (with the exception of the boot volume). So it's entirely possible using Win2000/XP (and the OP has already mentioned they're using 2000) to make D: the second partition on the primary drive in a multi-drive system.
For puggit's problem, I can't imagine why Windows would suddenly be refusing to maintain the custom allocation after a reboot - whilst I've had problems with 2000 and XP resetting some of my drive letters from time to time, I can always change them back (and have the change stick through a reboot) via Disk Management. The only thing that strikes me as a potential cause for problem is the way their system volume is C: and their boot volume is E: - I've never built a 2000/XP system where the boot and system volumes aren't the same, so I don't know how well they handle this when it comes to reallocating drive letters.
So what you are saying is that D: must always be on the second drive?
I guess this isn't a huge problem - Windows doesn't care where D: is as long as it exists and has all the data that was on it before the crash.
So I stick D: on the 2nd disk, run the restore and hey presto!
Am I right?
Edited to add how I managed to get D: on the primary disk - it was a stand alone drive for a long time before I added the 2nd drive, primarily for backup to disk.
>> Edited by puggit on Monday 10th January 16:28
I guess this isn't a huge problem - Windows doesn't care where D: is as long as it exists and has all the data that was on it before the crash.
So I stick D: on the 2nd disk, run the restore and hey presto!
Am I right?
Edited to add how I managed to get D: on the primary disk - it was a stand alone drive for a long time before I added the 2nd drive, primarily for backup to disk.
>> Edited by puggit on Monday 10th January 16:28
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