Go hunt for them. ;) Peace, Gman http://www.thevenusproject.com/index.php "The entire future of humankind is yet to be written" ----- Original Message ----- From: <recklessmaverick@xxxxxxxxxx> To: <pctechtalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 10:09 AM Subject: -=PCTechTalk=- Re: Velly Intwesting > Booted to Vista, Disk Management displays: > Disk 0 is the 500GB Data Disk and labeled D: (Healthy, active, Primary) > > Disk 1 is the 160GB Disk where the Vista Partition is Drive C: (System, > Boot, pagefile, active, crashdump, Primary Partition) and the XP Partition > is drive G: (Healthy, Logical Drive). The 'Disk' numbers are determined by where the particular drive is plugged into the mobo. Your Data drive is currently plugged into the first SATA port normally used for the main, Primary/Active internal drive (the location of the 'boot menu' files). This will show the same under XP, although the drive letter assignments will be different. This also does not matter as long as the BIOS knows which drive it should use during bootup to gain access to the proper 'boot menu' files mentioned above. Finally, the drives below are arbitrary to any of these issues. > External Maxtor is drive 2 and labeled F: > Internal card reader is drive J: > Internal Optical drive is drive E: > A third partition on drive 1 is a 16MB partition and is labeled H: > (Healthy) > > I:, K: and L: are unused card reader slots that I have disabled in Device > Manager and are not displayed. > > > Now going back to XP: > Data Drive is still Disk 0 but is labeled C: (Healthy, Active) > Vista is still drive 1 but is labeled D: (Healthy, System) > XP is still drive 1 but is labeled E: (Healthy, Boot) > A third partition on drive 1 is a 16MB partition and is labeled F: > (Healthy) I find it odd that the Data drive is taking the drive letter C:, but I can't argue with a system that now appears to work properly. I will postulate that the Data drive was not set in its proper place within the BIOS when you installed XP, leading to this slight confusion. > External Maxtor is drive 2 and labeled L: > Internal card reader is drive H: > Internal Optical drive is drive G: > > I:, J: and K: are unused card reader slots that I have disabled in Device > Manager and are not displayed. Conclusion (sort of): Under Vista, the Data drive is assuming the drive letter D: because it was formatted as a Primary volume (apparently with the Active bit also set, which should never be given to a non-OS drive). Had the entire Data drive been formatted within an Extended partition (Active not possible), it would have slipped to the letter E: under both OS's. This also likely accounts for its assertion as the C: drive under XP. If you do choose to redo the entire setup, first convert the Data drive from a Primary Active volume to a Logical drive enclosed within an Extended partition (a small portion of the drive will automatically be reserved as unformatted to keep track of all volumes created within the Extended area). Choosing Logical should automatically force the Extended part of that description, but approaches vary from one partitioning app to another. Once the Data drive is set to Logical, the two OS's will end up sharing the drive letters C: & D:, with the selected, booted OS always taking C: I would also physically swap the data and OS drive's SATA connectors at the mobo if the Disk0/Disk1 labels bother you. Otherwise, there is no real harm in leaving them as is as long as the BIOS knows to look to the right one at bootup, regardless of its physical position on the SATA ports. --------------------------------------------------------------- Please remember to trim your replies (including this sentence and everything below it) and adjust the subject line as necessary. To subscribe, unsubscribe or modify your email settings: //www.freelists.org/webpage/pctechtalk OR To subscribe to the mailing list, send an email to pctechtalk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject. To unsubscribe send email to pctechtalk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject. To access our Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PCTechTalk/messages/ //www.freelists.org/archives/pctechtalk/ To contact only the PCTT Mod Squad, write to: pctechtalk-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To join our separate PCTableTalk off-topic group, send a blank email to: pctabletalk+subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---------------------------------------------------------------