Drive Assignments

[kelly]

How are drives letters assigned in W2K or any Win OS for that matter?
I just installed a DVD-RW in a W2K machine. This machine has 3 CD/DVD drives and a Zip drive all on IDE 1 and 2.

I assumed that
IDE 1 Master would be picked up as the D
IDE 1 Slave would be picked up as the E
IDE 1 Master would be picked up as the F
IDE 1 Slave would be picked up as the G

but that was not the case. I ended up manually assigning letters.
- tony

[jflan]

How are drives letters assigned in W2K or any Win OS for that matter?
I just installed a DVD-RW in a W2K machine. This machine has 3 CD/DVD drives and a Zip drive all on IDE 1 and 2.

I assumed that
IDE 1 Master would be picked up as the D
IDE 1 Slave would be picked up as the E
IDE 1 Master would be picked up as the F
IDE 1 Slave would be picked up as the G

but that was not the case. I ended up manually assigning letters.
- tony
In my experience it's been by order of install for drives other than C.
It seems that I have to go back in and re-label them to my liking afterwards.

[Dan18960]

First I am going to "assume" that you labeled all the IDE - 1's by mistake.

Usually Win 2k and up take the BIOS configuration of bootup as a clue to assigning the drives.

SO, if you had a startup of (1) removable drive, (2) CD drive (this could be a DVD or CD), (3) Hard drive - I would expect the OS to assign the first CD drive in Master IDE 1 as D:, the second CD in Master IDE 2 as the E:, and then return to the Slave IDE 1 as F: and the final Slave IDE 2 as G: IF the Zip drive was on IDE 2 Slave. Because the Zip drive would be assigned the least drive value. The reason for this is that either Master CD Drives could be used to boot the computer if you had a bootable cd in them.

[kelly]

opps - copy/past error. Yes the first two are IDE 1 and second two are IDE 2.

Dan - that makes sense, but it's not what I observed. This is what I had before I reassigned drive letters:

IDE 1 Master = F - CD/DVD-RW
IDE 2 Master = G - CD-RW
IDE 1 Slave = E - CD/DVD
IDE 2 Slave = D - this is the Zip

- tony

[Dan18960]

Leavei it to the Zip drive to mess everything up LOL :rolleyes:

[mylanta]

Geez it isn't the zip drives fault Dan!

[Dan18960]

Sure it is Rich,

The Zip drive PROBABLY had a disk in it and read like a storage device unlike the CD drives that have to have "writing" software to act as a R-W storage device.

Anyway - I wasnt' going to take the blame for screwing up about the drive setups LOL:cool: