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Partition woes in Win3.X

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First post, by Gahhhrrrlic

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I guess I've been spoiled by Win9x and the disk manager it has but I found myself at a loss when trying to add a couple more partitions beyond C using FDISK. Problem is I want to keep drive D as my CD drive. I don't want it to end up as K or something because I have a lot of partitions I would like to add. However FDISK doesn't ask, it just automatically chooses the next HDD letter in line, ignoring my CD Drive and booting it out of the way. I know there's a way around this because back in the day this same computer I'm building now, had a D drive for the CD-ROM and also had several hard drive partitions following it. I just never figured out how to restore that partition structure after I lost that hard drive.

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Reply 2 of 7, by Stiletto

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Moved.

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Stiletto

Reply 3 of 7, by derSammler

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You can not have a CD-ROM drive between the letters of hard disk partitions on an MS-DOS based OS. There's a fixed scheme of how letters are assigned: floppy disk drives, hard disks / partitions, removable media. This is because the letters are already assigned long before the system even knows about a CD-ROM. And it's not possible to re-assign drive letters of hard disk partitions.

Reply 4 of 7, by Vipersan

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Just add my 10 cents ..
If you think about it ..
drive letters dont stick when assigned.
For example you can format a drive temporarily attached to a win7 system ..
When doing this windows will assign this a drive letter if one is needed..and to be visible to windows ..then this has to be so.
The letter assigned will be the next available ..
If you have many drives this could for exaple be K:
you then move that drive to a second computer which has no drive to install a diffent OS ..say ..win98
And that drive previously identified as K: ..is now seen as C:
A and B ..being reserved for floppy..
..at least thats my simple interpretation.
rgds
VS

Reply 5 of 7, by derSammler

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Windows 7 and all NT-based systems are working completely different (drive letters are like mount points there). This has nothing to do with how MS-DOS works. Here, you always get your primary partitions first, starting with C:, after that come the logical partitions. And then removable drives.

Reply 7 of 7, by Jo22

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Okay, this is not quite related to the issue, but..
There are also some differences in which way DOS 3.x and earlier handle floppy drives no. three and four..
They are assigned as C: and D:, whereas on DOS 5 and 6, they come after the fixed disk drives.

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