Win 98se.

Is it possible to change a primary partition on a slave drive into a logical partition without total data file loss?

To be honest with you, im not 100% sure. However, by my understanding, in XP you can do this reasonably safely and in Vista you can adjust your partitions completely, however in 95 -98 etc, i do not believe you can do this without 3rd party software, which even then can cause the partition to be unstable.

My advise would be to ensure you have a good backup of everything before attempting this, even if you where using xp or Vista.

Yes you can, using some 3rth party freeware, 'Ranish Partition Manager' and 'Partition Resizer'.

First use PR to shrink your partition as far as is possible with the data it's containing. Then use RPM to create a logical partition. Move as much data as will fit on the logical partition. Use PR to shrink the primary partion further, and to grow the logical partition. Repeat this until the primary partition is empty, and use RPM to delete the primary partiton, after which you can grow the logical partition to max.
When the drive is almost full, this is not a very practical way, of course, and I can imagine there's software out there which can do this in one step.

There is no direct way that I know as it would imply creating an extended partition and then a logical inside the extended. The easiest way would indeed be to move the data to an other partition (on your first drive or on a network drive ?) and recreate the partitions (the resizing method above would take much much more time unless the drive is half empty). If you want to keep it bootable, it might be more complicated. But why do you want to do that ?

Thank you all for your prompt responses.

The reason I wanted to change the partition type is because of the way MS-Dos allocates drive letters to Primary Partitions first, regardless of whether the partition is on the Master or Slave drive.

With multiple partitions this means that the partitions on the Master drive could be allocated drive letters C:, E:, F: etc... whilst on the Slave drive the partitions could be D:, G:, H: etc... I know there are 3rd party programs such as Letassig which will allow for changes to drive allocations when running in Windows but the allocations change back to the MS-Dos setup when working with the Command shell.

I probably just wanted a lazy way to change the allocations. I have now installed a third hdd as Master on the secondary ide, copied all data files from the primary ide slave then Fdisk'd the primary ide slave to partition without a Primary Partition, creating just an Extended Partition with Logical Partitions within. All working well.

Thanks again for your efforts on my behalf.

V...

To solve lettering problems, you might want to actually try Letter Assigner, it does have a DOS version:
http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/
do read the docs.

Some reference here:
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=85729

jaclaz

Be carefull though because any programs which point to locations on the current drive letter may misfunction should that letter change.

Thank you both Jaclaz and Riso for your additional comments.

Here is the MS KB on drive letter assignments showing that Primary Partition drive letters are allocated before others (but not why). Not having a Primary Partition on the second physical hard drive has already paid dividends for me.

Thanks again.