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.