Phantom Drive Letter

[lesmond74]

Hi,

I have an old IBM P3 which I added an Initio SATA controller card to. The drive attached to the card was partitioned as follows (all primary partitions) -

1. Win 98SE (C:\)
   
2. Xubuntu Linux
   
3. Linux Data Partition
   
4. FAT32 Data Partition (originally D:\)
   

There are no other drives in the system apart from a DVD-ROM drive.

I wiped everything bar Win98 and installed WinXP in a new partition right after Win98. Everything worked fine.

The plan is to triple boot with Lubuntu Linux. I used Gparted to create some more partitions before installing Linux. The drive is now partitioned like this, with drive letters for all FAT32 partitions as they now appear in Win 98 -

1. Win 98SE (primary - C:\)
   
2. Win XP (primary - F:\)
   
3. Ext3 Linux (primary)
   
4. Linux Swap (logical)
   
5. Linux Data (logical)
   
6. FAT32 Data (logical - E:\)
   

I would have thought that Win XP would become D:\ and the other FAT32 partition would be E:\. I first noticed something odd when I booted in to Win 98 and Scandisk wanted to do a full scan on 'D:\'. It did this without any issues.

But after logging in drive D:\ now shows up in My Computer as a 'phantom' drive letter. By this I mean -

• All other drives are labelled but this isn't
  
• Right-clicking 'Properties' shows it as 0 bytes capacity
  
• But right-clicking 'Format' shows it has the same capacity as the Win XP drive
  
• Double clicking on it brings up this error - 'D:\ is not accessible - A device attached to the system is not functioning'
  
• System Properties>Performance has this error message - 'Drive D is using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system'
  
• When emptying the Recycle Bin I get a message asking if I want to format D:\
  

My goal is to have Win98 recognise each partition as it should, without me having to reformat anything. I have tried various methods of re-assigning drive letters but without success. I can make the icon disappear with TweakUI but that is not a solution. All other FAT32 partitions are readable/writable and there are no conflicts/problems in Device Manager.

Does anyone have any solutions to this problem?

Thanks in advance.

Edited June 27, 2010 by lesmond74

[jaclaz]

Basically you created a Primary partition on which you used a filesystem that is called "Extended filesystem" and you created a second primary partition with a filesystem readable by Windows 98.

It is highly probable that those partition create the issue.

Workarounds are (cannot say WHICH one may work for you):

1. Hide the 2nd primary with XP on FAT32 and the third primary Ext3FS when booting DOS/Win98
   
2. Convert the XP partition to NTFS (thus making it "not understandable" by Win98) AND hide the third primary
   
3. Convert the XP partition to NTFS only
   
4. Try Letter Assigner: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/
   
5. Try the patched IO.SYS: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=118119
   

Try the above in reverse order, if the first partition is "big enough", it is possible that the partition with XP falls in the cases where #5 will work.

More generally, to avoid this kind of problems, the rule of thumb is to use ONLY one primary partition with DOS/Win9x and all the rest as logical volumes inside extended, both NT based systems and Linux OS were designed to be installed on logical volumes.

jaclaz

[rloew]

Hi,

I have an old IBM P3 which I added an Initio SATA controller card to. The drive attached to the card was partitioned as follows (all primary partitions) -

1. Win 98SE (C:\)
   
2. Xubuntu Linux
   
3. Linux Data Partition
   
4. FAT32 Data Partition (originally D:\)
   

There are no other drives in the system apart from a DVD-ROM drive.

I wiped everything bar Win98 and installed WinXP in a new partition right after Win98. Everything worked fine.

The plan is to triple boot with Lubuntu Linux. I used Gparted to create some more partitions before installing Linux. The drive is now partitioned like this, with drive letters for all FAT32 partitions as they now appear in Win 98 -

1. Win 98SE (primary - C:\)
   
2. Win XP (primary - F:\)
   
3. Ext3 Linux (primary)
   
4. Linux Swap (logical)
   
5. Linux Data (logical)
   
6. FAT32 Data (logical - E:\)
   

I would have thought that Win XP would become D:\ and the other FAT32 partition would be E:\. I first noticed something odd when I booted in to Win 98 and Scandisk wanted to do a full scan on 'D:\'. It did this without any issues.

But after logging in drive D:\ now shows up in My Computer as a 'phantom' drive letter. By this I mean -

• All other drives are labelled but this isn't
  
• Right-clicking 'Properties' shows it as 0 bytes capacity
  
• But right-clicking 'Format' shows it has the same capacity as the Win XP drive
  
• Double clicking on it brings up this error - 'D:\ is not accessible - A device attached to the system is not functioning'
  
• System Properties>Performance has this error message - 'Drive D is using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system'
  
• When emptying the Recycle Bin I get a message asking if I want to format D:\
  

My goal is to have Win98 recognise each partition as it should, without me having to reformat anything. I have tried various methods of re-assigning drive letters but without success. I can make the icon disappear with TweakUI but that is not a solution. All other FAT32 partitions are readable/writable and there are no conflicts/problems in Device Manager.

Does anyone have any solutions to this problem?

Thanks in advance.

Windows XP doesn't become D: because of the way Drives are scanned. IO.SYS scans as follows:

Active Partition on each Drive. If none, first Primary Partition.

Logical Partitions on each Drive.

Remaining Primary Partitions on each Drive.

I have identified a bug in IO.SYS that causes problems when Non-DOS Logical Partitions are used and more than one Primary Partition is used on a Drive.

This is a separate issue from the one Patched by Phelum.

I have written a Patch for it.

Can you confirm that your three Logical Partitions are in the order you have shown?

[lesmond74]

Try the patched IO.SYS: http://www.msfn.org/...howtopic=118119

Tried it but no change.

Try Letter Assigner: http://web.archive.o...s.com/LetAssig/

This appears to be a dead link.

I haven't tried 1, 2 or 3 yet.

Can you confirm that your three Logical Partitions are in the order you have shown?

Yes, the drive is partitioned as follows -

• C:\ - Win98 SE, FAT32, 25GB, Primary
  
• F:\ - Win XP, FAT32, 15GB, Primary
  
• Linux, Ext3, 10GB, Primary
  
• Extended partition containing the following logical volumes -
  
• Linux, Swap, 512MB
  
• Linux, Ext3, 35GB
  
• E:\ - FAT32, 25GB
  

As mentioned above, there is a phantom 'D:\' showing up in Win98

As I have not finished installing everything on XP and have not yet put anything on the other partitions, I think what I will end up doing is image WinXP, wipe all the partitions except Win98, then redo them all as logical volumes.

But if you have a patch which fixes this I will try it first.

Thanks.

[dencorso]

I think DLMANIP may work best for you. In any case, the links in this old post of mine still work (I've just tested them), and you can download both DLMANIP and LetAssig from them.

[jaclaz]

@lesmond74

Just for the record the given link is OK:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/

It leads to a page on which you can choose between several snapshots of the page, just click on last one:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080619125702/http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/

and see if the file is available (it is ):

http://web.archive.org/web/20080401085803/http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/LetAssig.zip

or try earlier snapshots.

To disambiguate possible mis-reporting of the actual "placement" of the partitions, though it seems like clear enough, and you should wait for rloew's patch, can you in the meantime get from here grub4dos:

http://nufans.net/grub4dos/

http://nufans.net/grub4dos/current_release/

http://nufans.net/grub4dos/current_release/grub4dos-0.4.4-2009-10-16.zip

From the zip get just grub.exe, boot to plain DOS and run it.

At the grub prompt issue command:

geometry (hd0)

[ENTER]

and confirm that the output corresponds to:

(hd0,0) C:\ - Win98 SE, FAT32, 25GB, Primary

(hd0,1) F:\ - Win XP, FAT32, 15GB, Primary

(hd0,2) Linux, Ext3, 10GB, Primary

Extended partition containing the following logical volumes -

(hd0,4) Linux, Swap, 512MB

(hd0,5) Linux, Ext3, 35GB

(hd0,6) E:\ - FAT32, 25GB

@dencorso

The dlmanip page is online :

http://sta.c64.org/dlmanip.html

no need in this case for the wayback machine...

jaclaz

[rloew]

I have not yet created an Installer for my IO.SYS Patch.

I have attached a simple Patcher that can be used to do the Patch.

Edit: This Patch is obsolete. It has been removed.

Edited December 26, 2011 by rloew

[dencorso]

Awesome!

Thanks a lot, RLoew!

[rloew]

@lesmond74

Did the Patch help?