Drive Lettering Order Problem

[dbradtbe]

I was wondering if anyone knows a way of doing this.

I have a Gigabyte motherboard with 8 hard drives attached to it. 2 via SATA in a Raid 0 which I want to appear as C Drive when it boots from CD but the other on board IDE controlled ahrd drives always come up as C Drive etc the best I have ever gotten is to get it to appear as E Drive unless I disconnect all the other drives.

Does anybody know a way of changing this order in any way.

One problem is that some of the IDE drivers are built into XP so it will always detect them first even when I use F6 to add drivers or slipstream them into the build using RYAN's script and files.

David B

[MHz]

Hi, I have a KNXP board with 3 HDs on it.

Windows nicely picks the order of the drives for you.

To avoid this mixup, I have dynamic HDs with no drive letters. They mount onto my basic HD as folders. So no messed up My Computer problems. The volumes on the Drives are also resizable and fault tolerant etc...

So long as you are trying to make a sata drive as primary, you should be able to unless you have them set as as an array. If not an array, windows sould have the drivers for them? I have no drivers installed for my sata drive, unless I choose to use the array feature. The Dynamic Disk feature is better concept, I considered.

Guessing, what your exact configuration is? Check your manuals. I have 3 of them.

They tell you about using F6 and how to put sata raid drivers in.

Check your settings in bios.

Press Delete key to enter bios when you bootup the PC. When in bios, press Ctrl + F1 to bring up the hidden advanced features.

Hope this helps you out a little.

[dbradtbe]

I tried changing them all except the Boot Disk to Dynamic but they are all still picked up and founf during the booting of the unanttended CD so the problem still appears.

Does anyone know if you can change the disk lettering etc if I booted from BartPE or something like that?.

David B

[cakersq]

First, I wouldn't install windows to the SATA drives. The install becomes unstable, especially the boot sector.

If you still want to install windows to the SATA drives and have them as the C: drive, there are a couple of options. You hit on the first which is to remove the other drives, temporarily.

The other option is to use an interesting Windows Bug. If you enter the bios, and go to the Standard BIOS Options menu, and set the hard drives to NONE. Important, do NOT disable the Onboard IDE connectors from the Integrated Peripherials.

Reboot the comptuer and boot the Windows XP CD, press F6 to load the SATA Drivers. When the setup menu boots, it will still display the IDE drives. Partition the SATA Drive, and ignore the fact that that it might not be the C: drive. Then Reboot the computer.

After you boot Windows CD with the SATA Drivers again, the SATA Drive will be the C: Drive. This is due to the fact that Windows will scan for BIOS drives, and load those drives after the "SCSI" Drivers.

[big poppa pump]

First, I wouldn't install windows to the SATA drives.  The install becomes unstable, especially the boot sector.

That's a bunch of bull. I have been running windows of SATA drives for more than a year and have yet to see something go wrong. I have run Prime 95 for 12 hours straight, 3dmark01 and 3dmark03 full complete tests one after the other 10 times and have yet to see windows BSOD on me, or for that matter even come up with a single error.