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Partition Anomolies

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by rogerloc

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The system is WinTel W98SE. This system has a 20GB master and 6GB slave HDDs. The master is partitioned in four partitions of varions sizes. (C, D, E, F)I remove the slave (G) which is one big partition taking care to do all the software bits too. And when I reboot the system, the slave is gone as expected but also partition F is gone from the master. The other curious part is all the data that was in F is now in E and E is in D and D is in C. Some programs I can hand edit the properties to redirect them to E and others I have to manually delete and reinstall.

I have exhausted my extensive library and come up empty handed. Can any one there explain this phenomena?

rogerloc@attbroadband.com

1 reply

by thechas

This is not an anomolie. It is the way that W9X handles partitions and multiple drives.

The primary dos partition on drive 0 is always drive C.
The primary dos partition on the second drive is always D.
This continues for all hard drives.
Then, the logical drives in the extended dos partition on drive 0 are assigned in order.
Then the logical drives for the second hard drive.
And so on.

Finally, Windows assigns letters to the removable drives in interface order. For these drives, you can change the assigned letter.

So 2 hard drives, with 3 logical drives on the first drive would be
primary partition on drive 0 C
priamry partition on drive 1 D
logical drive 1 on drive 0 E
logical drive 2 on drive 0 F
logical drive 3 on drive 0 G

If you remove the second hard drive, logical drive 1 on drive 0 now becomes drive letter D.

The only way to stop this in 9X is to make the entire second drive an extended partition, and set up logical drives. Then the first logical drive on the second hard drive will follow the last logical drive on the first hard drive.

Windows XP does not do this by the way.

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