New hard drive letter allocation

[Iain Hogg]

I've just added a second hard drive to my old PC (running XP Pro) and now it is recognised as E: with the CD still on D:

I've tried uninstalling all the drivers in Device Manager and letting it find the devices in the order I want (2nd hard drive as D:, CD as E but it just won't be fooled.

Does anyone know if/how I can resolve this?

Iain

 

[Zwerver]

As far as I know :

Primary master (IDE 0) => c:
Secondary master (IDE 1) => d:

So if you placed your second disk as slave on ide (0) it will be e:
Perhaps you should try this disk as secondary master and your cd as primary or secondary slave ...

 

[Iain Hogg]

That's what I'd expect, but the new drive is definately on the same IDE channel as the C: drive (IDE 1) with the CD on IDE 2

Iain

 

[Fanum]

I put a new HD in Dani's drive the other week, also designated as a slave on the primary IDE cable.......it also got designated incorrectly.

Didn't really bother trying to sort it out as it seemed a minor issue.......so I haven't poked around in XP control panel to look for a solution.

However, there was a thing in '98 and '95 where you could change drive letter assignations.....if it bothers you Iain, I'd start by loking in control panel advanced settings to see if it's there somewhere.

 

[guitarman]

Iain,

I just installed a Maxtor hard drive using software from the Maxtor site (thanks Cookie )

It's set up as a slave to the C drive (sounds vaguely rude) and is allocated drive D with the other drives (CD writer and DVD reader) following.

Can you get any proprietary software and try to re-install it?

Cheers

Dick

 

[cookie]

you want xp's disk management function, you do

it's a bit fiddly to find so i looked it up

 

[Clive]

Under XP...

RMC on "My Computer" and choose Manage

Select the "Disk Management" icon under Storage

Select the CDROM Icon and RMC - choose "Change Drive Letter and Path" - change D: to something else such as Z:

This may prompt with some warnings.

Select the second partition (E: ) and choose "Change Drive Letter and Path" - D: should now be available as a selection - if it isn't you may need to reboot, before trying again.

Then go back to the CDROM (now Z: ) and change to E:

 

[Iain Hogg]

Thanks guys.

I had to disconnect the CDROM to deallocate the drive letter, but after that, Disk Management did the trick and reconnecting the CD allocated the "correct" drive letter.

Cookie, an interesting link thanks, it should while away a few winter evenings!

Iain