Harddisk (partition) order???

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lon Leader
  • Start date Start date
L

Lon Leader

On my A8N-SLi I currently have harddisks on the IDE controller and on
a Promise Ultra 100 controller in one of the PCI slots. All drives
have multiple logical partitions on them (only one primary - C - on
the IDE controller). If I add a SATA drive with multiple logical
partitions to the motherboard SATA controller, where in my current
chain of partitions will it insert its partitions?

I am aware I can reassign drive letters with WindowsXP as a 'solution'
to drive letters shifting but I'm curious as to what to expect.
 
Lon Leader said:
On my A8N-SLi I currently have harddisks on the IDE controller and on
a Promise Ultra 100 controller in one of the PCI slots. All drives
have multiple logical partitions on them (only one primary - C - on
the IDE controller). If I add a SATA drive with multiple logical
partitions to the motherboard SATA controller, where in my current
chain of partitions will it insert its partitions?

I am aware I can reassign drive letters with WindowsXP as a 'solution'
to drive letters shifting but I'm curious as to what to expect.
Click to expand...

Last time I did that, it put them at E: onwards (that system had
one IDE primary system partition and a CD-ROM drive (D:).
On the next system I had to do it to, I disconnected the CD-ROM
before booting and XP put them at D: onwards. When I reconnected
the CD and rebooted, the CD drive was allocated the next available
slot.
HTH
 
Last time I did that, it put them at E: onwards (that system had
one IDE primary system partition and a CD-ROM drive (D:).
On the next system I had to do it to, I disconnected the CD-ROM
before booting and XP put them at D: onwards. When I reconnected
the CD and rebooted, the CD drive was allocated the next available
slot.
HTH
Click to expand...

Thanks for responding, Rob, but your experience isn't really
applicable to my situation. You don't have any logical partitions on
your drive for the added SATA to displace (assuming it might want to
do that), nor do you have a Promise card with drives on it that the
SATA might muscle in in front of (as I expect it would).
 
Lon Leader said:
On my A8N-SLi I currently have harddisks on the IDE controller and on
a Promise Ultra 100 controller in one of the PCI slots. All drives
have multiple logical partitions on them (only one primary - C - on
the IDE controller). If I add a SATA drive with multiple logical
partitions to the motherboard SATA controller, where in my current
chain of partitions will it insert its partitions?

I am aware I can reassign drive letters with WindowsXP as a 'solution'
to drive letters shifting but I'm curious as to what to expect.
Click to expand...

Can you be a bit more clear on what you want to know and why.

Basically the motherboard will say what goes first/second/ect..
But windows (XP/2k) will tag each drive with a unique identifier..
So basically when you get a drive letter in xp/2k .. it's saying driveD =
drive with id of xxxx

Partitions are on a drive (or spann'd across drives)
Drives are seperate..
I find your question a bit confusing but that could be my lack of experience
with todays computers ;) ..
and a logical partition should be able to have a bootable OS these days
because of the way that programs like grub and windows uses pointers.
 
Can you be a bit more clear on what you want to know and why.

Basically the motherboard will say what goes first/second/ect..
But windows (XP/2k) will tag each drive with a unique identifier..
So basically when you get a drive letter in xp/2k .. it's saying driveD =
drive with id of xxxx

Partitions are on a drive (or spann'd across drives)
Drives are seperate..
I find your question a bit confusing but that could be my lack of experience
with todays computers ;) ..
and a logical partition should be able to have a bootable OS these days
because of the way that programs like grub and windows uses pointers.
Click to expand...

OK, I'll exagerate to give you an example - I don't really have this
many drives/partitions, but lets assume I have drives on all available
channels of my IDE and add-on Promise controller and each drive has
two logical partitions. And I'll omit the single primary boot
partition I have because wherever it is, it will be 'C'. Here's how
letters would be assigned by DOS/Windows:

Primary IDE controller:
- primary channel - D,E
-second channel - F,G
Second IDE controller:
- primary channel - H,I
-second channel - J,K
Primary Promise controller:
- primary channel - L,M
-second channel - N,O
Second Promise contoller:
- primary channel - P,Q
-second channel - R,S

If I now plug in a SATA drive with two more logical partitions on it,
will they be D,E (bumping up all the other letters because maybe SATA
takes precedence on the motherboard ove IDE?), or will they be L,M
(because SATA, being on the motherboard, will take precedence over the
add-on Promise controller - I suspect this will be the case), or will
they be T,U (what I would prefer, but I suspect I will have to achieve
by using XP to reassign the letters).
 
Lon said:
OK, I'll exagerate to give you an example - I don't really have this
many drives/partitions, but lets assume I have drives on all available
channels of my IDE and add-on Promise controller and each drive has
two logical partitions. And I'll omit the single primary boot
partition I have because wherever it is, it will be 'C'. Here's how
letters would be assigned by DOS/Windows:

Primary IDE controller:
- primary channel - D,E
-second channel - F,G
Second IDE controller:
- primary channel - H,I
-second channel - J,K
Primary Promise controller:
- primary channel - L,M
-second channel - N,O
Second Promise contoller:
- primary channel - P,Q
-second channel - R,S

If I now plug in a SATA drive with two more logical partitions on it,
will they be D,E (bumping up all the other letters because maybe SATA
takes precedence on the motherboard ove IDE?), or will they be L,M
(because SATA, being on the motherboard, will take precedence over the
add-on Promise controller - I suspect this will be the case), or will
they be T,U (what I would prefer, but I suspect I will have to achieve
by using XP to reassign the letters).
Click to expand...
That's a good question Lon and I've not seen any guide that shows the
order that isn't IDE specific. I will have in about one week a A8N-SLI
Premium, with 2 SATA drives and 1 old IDE - I'm going to setup the SATA
drives, then add the IDE and observe what happens to the drive letters.
Can you not answer this by just doing it also? Perhaps I'm missing the
concern you have about doing it empirically.

Sorry, don't have an answer yet.

Derek
 
That's a good question Lon and I've not seen any guide that shows the
order that isn't IDE specific. I will have in about one week a A8N-SLI
Premium, with 2 SATA drives and 1 old IDE - I'm going to setup the SATA
drives, then add the IDE and observe what happens to the drive letters.
Can you not answer this by just doing it also? Perhaps I'm missing the
concern you have about doing it empirically.

Sorry, don't have an answer yet.

Derek
Click to expand...

I can only be curious at the moment because I don't have a SATA drive
yet. Just bought the A8N-SLi / 64 X2 3800+ / OCz 2x1gig a few days
ago. Now I have to wait for one or two more Canada Pension cheques to
roll in before the SATA makes it's debut. :-)

-=( Lon )=-
 
To be honest, I'm not 100% sure about, but my experience says that the logic
behind the letters assignation on W2k and XP is as following by default:

1) Starting from C, with the first physical connection drive (IDE and then
SATA) the system will continue with the PRIMARY partitions. That means D
will be the primary partition on the next IDE drive or SATA in case there is
not more IDE drives.

2) Once all the primary partitions are named, the system will continue with
the LOGIC partitions of all the drives, following the same connection
criteria. Let's say you have 2 IDE and one ATA, all of then with three
partitions ( 1 primary and 2 logics).

The naming would be: C= IDE-1 primary, D= IDE-2 primary, E= SATA-1 primary,
F=IDE-1 logic-1, G= IDE-1 logic-2,.... and finally the optical drives.



When you upgrade the pc with a new HD, the system will continue naming after
the last optical drive.



To address this situation properly you have to go trough Administration
Tools on the Control Panel.

Choose there Equipment administration (not sure if this is the proper name
because I don't use english XP vers.) and go to Drive administration.

Then go to the last optical drive, click right mouse and choose Change the
letter and move it to the bottom; from H to Z for example.

Repeat the process with the next optical drive G and move it to Y.



Once you have opened gap between the HD's and the optical drives, according
the letter you need for the partitions on the new HD, then you start
changing the current letters of these partitions to put them near the former
HD's names.



And finally, once all the HD's drives are all together, then rename again
the optical drives as desired.

Once you reboot, the system will use the new naming always.



Warning: do not rename any partition of HD's that contains programs
installed; because the system won't be able to find the link to the new HD
name so easily.
 
To be honest, I'm not 100% sure about, but my experience says that the logic
behind the letters assignation on W2k and XP is as following by default:

1) Starting from C, with the first physical connection drive (IDE and then
SATA) the system will continue with the PRIMARY partitions. That means D
will be the primary partition on the next IDE drive or SATA in case there is
not more IDE drives.

2) Once all the primary partitions are named, the system will continue with
the LOGIC partitions of all the drives, following the same connection
criteria. Let's say you have 2 IDE and one ATA, all of then with three
partitions ( 1 primary and 2 logics).

The naming would be: C= IDE-1 primary, D= IDE-2 primary, E= SATA-1 primary,
F=IDE-1 logic-1, G= IDE-1 logic-2,.... and finally the optical drives.



When you upgrade the pc with a new HD, the system will continue naming after
the last optical drive.



To address this situation properly you have to go trough Administration
Tools on the Control Panel.

Choose there Equipment administration (not sure if this is the proper name
because I don't use english XP vers.) and go to Drive administration.

Then go to the last optical drive, click right mouse and choose Change the
letter and move it to the bottom; from H to Z for example.

Repeat the process with the next optical drive G and move it to Y.



Once you have opened gap between the HD's and the optical drives, according
the letter you need for the partitions on the new HD, then you start
changing the current letters of these partitions to put them near the former
HD's names.



And finally, once all the HD's drives are all together, then rename again
the optical drives as desired.

Once you reboot, the system will use the new naming always.



Warning: do not rename any partition of HD's that contains programs
installed; because the system won't be able to find the link to the new HD
name so easily.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the feedback. Interestingly enough, I long ago changed my
optical drives to Y and Z and just leave them at those letters. Makes
it easier when software creates virtual drives, or when I plug in my
USB card reader and it spawns it's four drive letters.

The fly in the ointment I think I'm going to have is the add-in
Promise controller. I suspect the SATA will butt in ahead of it, and I
DO have programs installed on the Promise mounted drives.
 
Back
Top