Pinning drive letters in Win 98

I added a hard disk to a 98 box to find that it has shoved the CD-ROM drive letter one up (used to be E:, now it's F:). This in spite of the fact that the drive letter was locked at E: in the control panel for the CD drive. It now means that all programs that reference CDs in the CD drive won't work without a complete re-install or major surgery on the Registry (not something I really want to contemplate, if I'm honest).

Anyone got any ideas about how I can sort this out?

Hard disks get priority over other devices which is why it bumped the CDROM over to F. They also have to be labeled consecutively from C onwards. You can't change the ordering of hard disks.

I don't think there is any easy way of telling everything that the CDROM drive is now F apart from reinstalling and search and replace on the registry...

Back in ye (yes, I know ye isn't a real word) olde days, I tried to keep the CDROM drive at a higher letter that what was automatically assigned so it wouldn't have this problem. But now that everything starts setup by booting off the CDROM it's harder to do.

- Trevor

Are you sure it works that way in Win98? I thought it was only Win2K that did that (I had the same problem, and had to completely reformat )

I *think* so... I haven't used Windows 9x/ME for years now so I can't tell you for certain.

I just remember that you couldn't change the drive letter for any hard disks which were present at bootup. They would be listed first and then removable drives would be listed.

The ordering of hard disks was also fixed from what I remember. It was whatever order Windows detected them in.

It's not that hard to fix most places that store the installation drive letter though. Just search and replace through the registry.

- Trevor

Yeah, hard disks are controlled by the BIOS and removable disks (which a CD-ROM falls under) are controlled by Windows. If you had more than one removable disk than you could change the drive letters but they would still come after the hard drives. You could try making the CD-ROM the secondary master but I don't think that would work. I believe that it will always be a slave drive.

If it is just shortcuts on the desktop that point to the drive you can always change those to reflect F: now without reinstalling the porgrams.

Or use Partition magic. it has a neat feature to fix all that crap for you. Searches the registry for instances of F: and replaces them with G:.

tman is right about the way Windows9x behaves with drives, i.e., bumping up the CD-ROM's letter when you add a second hard drive. There are utilities that are made for just the occasion when programs are left looking for drive E:, which is now drive F:. They will search for all references to drive E: in shortcuts, files, registry, etc. and change them to F: for you. Quick and easy.

The only one that comes to mind, however, is DriveMapper, from PowerQuest. It happens to come bundled with PartitionMagic. But I doubt you want to purchase the program simply for that ability. But, since PowerQuest thought of it, perhaps someone else has, too.

Edit: Darn, too slow again.

Not strictly true.

For "compatibility", Win98 assigns hard disk drive letters in exactly the same way as DOS. It doesn't do the same for CD-ROM drives. This has nothing to do with the BIOS (unless you're running in 16-bit compatibility mode).

The order's a bit complicated. See this or this for more details.

It's a bit skimpy on what happens if you have multiple primary partitions on a single hard disk, but since DOS fdisk doesn't let you arrange your partitions like this, I guess it's academic for most people.

Edit: found a FAQ at Seagate with more info

I'll have to second the Partition Magic suggestion. I got a .iso image of it from some site on the internet a year or two ago (for "evaluation" purposes.) I had a problem where some partitions had to be resized without losing data. I only used it couple times, so I never bought it, but it worked like a champ for every task I gave it.

Edit: I just checked Kazaa and both versions 7 and 8 are available for "evaluation." Just seach for "partition magic iso."

In W2K/NT you can use the Drive Administration tool to change drive letters around: in 98 it isn't available, it seems.

I wonder if it would be possible to repartition the drive into two partitions : one with a small size ( 4mb ), which you don't format. Then would have C D E F as hard drives. CD-rom would be G-drive. now use the subst command to subst the CD-rom to E:
I haven't tried this on win98, havent got it. I know it is possible to subst the B: drive under win2k, but in use drives fail...

Whichever partition you set as active in fdisk (the boot disk) would be C:, regardless of what was on it. However, since you can change the boot disk in Nt/2k by editing boot.ini, that may work. You just lose drive C:.

change to a Mac

Then NO software I use would work.

FRANK! You're back - from outer space!! Where HAVE you been?

Well... You could use a x86 emulator on the Mac...

- Trevor

Rob,

Sorry, I just spent 2 hours typing a very nice reply and then netscape crashes.
I'm pissed... that foto should be covered