Personal computing discussed

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BIF
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Raptor is Drive 2, letter 'D'...not what I wanted.

Sun Jun 06, 2004 3:33 pm

I would like to configure my new system so that my SATA drive 0 is the "Physical drive 0".

Right now, my system recognizes the IDE drives first. When I installed Windows/XP, the installer wanted to copy some files to one of my IDE drives, so I let it go ahead and format a partition.

Well, now that "temporary" partition is my C:drive, and my expen$ive Raptor is my D: drive, where the OS resides. I do want the OS on the Raptor, but right now, both partitions (and physical hard drives) are required for me to boot. This isn't at all what I wanted. I would like for my Raptor to be both my boot and my system drive.

Does anybody have any ideas?

I'm thinking of disconnecting my IDE drives and re-attempting my Win/XP installation, but if anybody has any insight on this, please let me know.

Thanks!
 
nulfire
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Sun Jun 06, 2004 3:39 pm

Yeah, it seems like reloading the pc without the ide drive plugged in would be easiest, seeing as how you just loaded anyways.

Just plug the ide drive back in after you get XP installed. Everything should run fine!
 
emkubed
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Sun Jun 06, 2004 3:43 pm

Not necessary.

Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

Right click on drive(s) in question and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Enjoy.
 
mattsteg
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Sun Jun 06, 2004 4:02 pm

emkubed wrote:
Not necessary.

Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

Right click on drive(s) in question and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Enjoy.
Can't change the drive that the OS is on that way. I believe the system drive's stuck as well.

Best way to do what you want is to unplug your IDE hard drives and install XP while just the raptor is installed.
...
 
emkubed
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Sun Jun 06, 2004 4:14 pm

mattsteg wrote:
emkubed wrote:
Not necessary.

Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

Right click on drive(s) in question and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Enjoy.
Can't change the drive that the OS is on that way. I believe the system drive's stuck as well.

Best way to do what you want is to unplug your IDE hard drives and install XP while just the raptor is installed.


Argh, you are correct. The Crack Rock. I am smoking it.
 
BIF
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Sun Jun 06, 2004 4:17 pm

mattsteg wrote:
emkubed wrote:
Not necessary.

Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

Right click on drive(s) in question and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Enjoy.
Can't change the drive that the OS is on that way. I believe the system drive's stuck as well.

Best way to do what you want is to unplug your IDE hard drives and install XP while just the raptor is installed.


Matt is correct on this, guys. I already tried to change the drive letters in Disk Management before I started this topic. I was disallowed. Which is better than being "disavowed," I guess! Er...Sorry for the pun...I'm in a Mission Impossible kind of mood right now.

And yeah, since I just loaded, and haven't installed any applications yet, it should be a simple matter to re-install XP.

Hey, does anybody know if Partition Magic will let me partition my SATA drives? I have two, and I'd like to use PM version 8.0 to configure the WD Raptor and the Maxtor 250 that I have (both SATA), before I re-install Windows/XP. Neither of these drives will be used as an XP "dynamic disk".

I'm confident that PM8.0 will work, because as long as the OS has the drivers for the SATA controller (and it does), then the OS should treat them like any old ATA drives, just like the IDE drives are...only faster.

I plan to try this anyhow...because you don't really get good at this stuff unless you screw it up once in awhile. But hey...if you know the answer, please let us all know....it may save me some time, and that wouldn't be all that bad, either.

Thanks!
 
Usacomp2k3
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Mon Jun 07, 2004 6:08 pm

BIF wrote:
Hey, does anybody know if Partition Magic will let me partition my SATA drives?


why don't you just use fdisk... much easier and simpler

and I'd be extremely careful changing drive letters after you have already installed... that's just asking for trouble
 
BIF
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Tue Jun 08, 2004 12:34 am

I suppose I could use FDISK.

right now, my IDE drives still show up as drives 1 and 2, and my SATA drives as 3 and 4.

It doesn't seem to be a problem. I unplugged the IDE drives and re-installed WIN/XP to my Raptor's first primary partition. That became C:

I have a bunch of other (hidden) partitions scattered all over the place. I need to do some reorganization. It's odd, but whenever I create a new partition, the OS wants to start with the drive letter "I". I'd really like to use "E". But this is minor for the time being.

Anyhow, I'm typing this on my new system, and it's stable. I have applied my SP1 and all the hotfixes, plus my security software.

Tuesday, I'll spend the evening tidying up my hard drives, and with any luck, I'll get this drive letter thing sorted out and maybe I'll be able to get started with the application installations.

But for now, I've done enough. I'm off to slumber. G'night for now, folks!
 
mattsteg
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Tue Jun 08, 2004 1:02 am

BIF wrote:
It's odd, but whenever I create a new partition, the OS wants to start with the drive letter "I". I'd really like to use "E". But this is minor for the time being.
Well now that windows is installed you can reappropriate other drive letters all you want.
...
 
BIF
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Tue Jun 08, 2004 9:54 am

mattsteg wrote:
Well now that windows is installed you can reappropriate other drive letters all you want.


I thought so too, but when I tried to do this in Disk Management, the "drop down" selector always starts with "I".

I believe it's probably because there are partitions (all hidden) already having those drive letters (on the IDE drives). I don't know how, but somehow the OS thinks that six drive letters (D through H) are already taken up.

I'm not sweating it yet. I'm planning to test my SATA drives' unallocated sectors, and if everything goes okay, I'll move everything from my IDE drives to the SATA drives so I can de-allocate all IDE partition space (to prepare for dynamic disk striping).

That should eliminate any drive letter misunderstandings between me, my hard drives, and my OS. I also want to reconnect my Promise ATA100 PCI card and one 80 GB drive so that I can try "triple-striping" between three IDE drives, and compare it with "dual-striping" between two IDE drives, as well as with SATA Raptor vs. SATA 7200RPM performance.

I'll keep you posted on my progress.
 
APWNH
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Tue Jun 08, 2004 4:04 pm

I know what you did wrong. You have to specify that you have that drive, during windows installation. You have to press F6 before the CD loads all the drivers, then it asks for the drivers for your SCSI device, and you put in a floppy with the SATA controller drivers. Then it works fine, you do everything with that drive.

i had only a Raptor for a few months, then i got a Maxtor. It worked totally fine then.


good luck!
 
BIF
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Tue Jun 08, 2004 9:05 pm

Nope, I didn't do anything wrong, but I did figure out the nature of the beast. Heh heh! It's pretty funny, actually.

As part of my upgrade, I also installed one of those internal 3.5" USB camera-card readers. You know, one of those "8-in-1" devices that reads XD, SD, Smart Media, and other types of memory cards?

Well, I found out that that little guy is reserving drive letters D, E, F, and G as "removable disk" drives. Of course, my DVD Drive, being next in line, gets drive letter H. Hence, the reason the OS wants to give me drive "I" as my first available drive letter.

In case you're interested, here's how I discovered the truth:

I used Partition Magic to create a couple of huge NTFS partitions on my SATA drives, with the intention of using Norton Disk Doctor to do a surface scan of the free space. The only time I ever had a bad disk drive was when it came from the factory that way.

So I allocated these huge partitions and started Norton Scandisk. Well, he came up with a checklist of all my drives, and sure enough, there were drive letters D, E, F, and G, all showing up as removable drives.

I confirmed this with Windows Explorer. D'oh!

Well, it's good to know how it works. And I've changed it by way of Disk Management. My memory card reader drives are now identified by letters U, V, W, and X, so that they'll (hopefully) show up at the bottom of any Windows Explorer lists of drives.


Incidentally, I thought I'd relate to you why I run Scandisk on new drives. You see, several years ago, I nearly ran out of warranty before I discovered I had a problem, because the bad sectors I had were in a large "unallocated" space on that drive. I learned I had a problem when I used Partition Magic to "move/resize" a partition into that region of bad media.

Boy, what a mess that was! I spent hours fixing that one! I could have avoided this entire problem had I done some cursory testing on that drive with either Norton Scandisk or Windows' CHKDSK (I was using Win 98 at the time) before putting important data or applications on it.

After a lengthy period of time, I was finally able to recover my most important data. And Maxtor was fast with the exchange deal. Plus, I had learned a valuable lesson: Do a disk scan on any new drive I get!

Anyhow, with Partition Magic, I like the graphical interface over FDISK's text-based interface, and I think I'm less prone to making mistakes with Partition Magic.

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