REQ: Please Explain My HDD configuration

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young

I bought a new 80G HDD and used FDISK to divide it into three
partitions, 30G, 30G and 20G. First partition is primary active.
second and third are logical drives in the extended partition.

I have done this many times, so I fail to under stand the result in XP

I have another single-partition HDD as c drive and this new 80G'er as
a slave (second) HDD.

XP's My Computer shows my first drive as c drive just fine, but then
shows my second drive backwards. That is, its first partition is
assigned as f, the second as e, and the third as d.

That can't be right. What did I do wrong?

Thanks
 
Hi,

You probably did nothing wrong, and were expecting WinXP to letter the
drives in the same fashion as a Win9x system would. In an NT system, they
don't necessarily follow this same progression. Start/run diskmgmt.msc,
right-click the volumes and you can change the drive letters to a scheme you
are comfortable with. The only letter you cannot change is the one assigned
to the system partition (C:\ in this case).

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Win9x
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone
 
I've never understood it. But it's easy to use the Disk Manager in Administrative Tools to change the letters of all the drives except the C: drive or the Boot drive and the System drive.
 
As Rick said, XP does not assign drive letters like 9x systems did.

9x systems assign drive letters as follows:

First hard disk, first primary partition, C:
Second hard disk, first primary partition, D:

Then the logical partitions are assigned drive letters as they are found. So 3 logical partitions on the first drive would be E, F and G. Then the logical partitions, if any on the second drive would get their letters. Then CD drives and the like get their letters.

XP "remembers" what letters are assigned to what physical partitions. So if you have C, D and E for hard disks/partitions, then your CD drive is F, the next physical partition that the system finds after you add a new drive, will get G:.
 
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