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Drive letters assignment during boot up

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by nikolay_kolev 1 view

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I have a simple question:
How are the drive letters assigned to the different hard drives and paritions, respectivley, during the boot process. Is this determined by the BIOS or the Master Boot Record or ..., and which drives/partitions take precedence when a decision is made. I am having a problem because my drive letters change when adding a second HDD to a system, and I cannot boot normally into a multiboot system. I am curious if there is a way to change the way letters are assigned to logical drives. Windows 2000 takes care of the problem (although in a really strange way), but Windows 98 cannot find the partition where its sytem files reside bacause there resides the primary partition of the second hard drive.

Thanks!

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by thechas

Your BIOS looks for the "boot" files on the primary partition of the first hard drive.
This is normally the master drive on the first IDE controller.
Some BIOS can be set to use alternate controllers (SCSI, plug in cards) as the boot source.

Toboot into windows 98 installed on an alternate partition, you need to use a boot manager.

As to drive assignments, the Microsoft default is as follows:
Drive 0 primary partition is drive "C"
Drive 1 primary partition is drive "D"
Drive 2 primary partition is drive "E" etc.
Drive 0 logical drives follow last primary partition in order. (F, G, H)
Drive 1 logical drives follow next (I, J, K)
Drive 2 logical drives follow last (L, M, N)
Then your removable media drives follow in order of connection.

There is a program that you can download from a link at www.aumha.org that is said to work good for allowing you to freely assign drive letters in W9X. I haven't used it myself.

For a multi-boot system, all of the advice that I have read recommends that you install the oldest OS first, followed by the newer versions in order.

If you are attempting to set up a dual-boot W2K/W98 system, you may be able to accomplish your goal by manually editing the Boot.ini file.

For detailed information on the boot.ini commands, search microsoft on the terms boot.ini and bootcfg or, check out the dual boot section at www.systeminternals.com

Chas

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