Odd WIN2K Drive Assignment During Setup

[John-K]

Due to a multitude of problesm, I have been forced to reinstall Win2K a number of times.

I have two HDs, one that I use for OS and programs, and one that I use for data.

On top of the floppy, I also have three removable media drives: a CD burner, a DVD burner, and a Jazz drive, which I despise.

To reinstall, what I have done is to delete the primary partition; recreate the primary partition and make it active (only one primary partition); and then setup using the bootable Win2K CD.

Usually, the three removable media drives are enumerated consecutively as E, F, or G -- that is, if the setup goes right.

The correct letter assignment should be:

A: Floppy
C: Primary partition (NTFS)
D: Non-bootable partition (Fat32)
E: DVD Burner
F: CD Burner
G: Jazz Drive

What I get sometimes is:

A: Floppy
C: Non-bootable partition (Fat32)
D: DVD Burner
E: CD Burner
F: Jazz Drive
G: Primary partition (NTFS)

In reading the MS Knowledge Base Articles, it should not do this. It should first look for the bootable, active primary partition and assign that to C:

Anyone have any clues as to why this might be happening? It is a bit of a nuisance to me.

 

[berky]

what do you have on your fat32 partition? can you delete that? if i were you, i'd delete that one as well, and then make a primary ntfs for the os, and then another ntfs for your storage or whatever you use it for.

 

[Zwitterion]

Are you trying to reassign the drive letters? I'm pretty sure you can use the Manger program for this. Right click my computer | manage.

 

[SJConsultant]

Not sure why this occured, as I had the same thing happen here when I did a fresh install of SBS2003. After I realized the root drive was other than C:, I started over again, this time disconnecting all drives except the one I was installing the OS on. After I got the base OS installed, I reconnected the rest of the drives and everything fell into place.

 

[stevewm]

I've found that if a drive has multiple partitions, deleting the primary partition and re-creating it during the 2k/XP first stage installer will cause OTHER primary partitions to be assigned C: instead of D: and E:, etc......

To stop this I simply do not delete the partition. In fact there is no need too. Just format it!



But anyways, whats the big deal about having the OS installed on C: Its more cosmetic than anything. The OS and applications you install do not care what drive letter they are installed to..... You may find a application the is hardcoded to C:, but those are few and far inbetween......