find the letter by the way it partitioned

[Dustinwmew]

OK, I know that windows looks for a primary partition on the 1st drive letters it, then one on the 2nd drive, then 3rd, ..., then looks for logical partitions on each drive.

I need to know what it does for letting if a drive has more then 1 primary partition on it.

The microsoft site say that it looks for A primary partition on each drive.

[Dustinwmew]

ok, here is the order of my partitions, and drives. Can someone tell my what windows would letter them?

Disk 1:

1st primary

2nd primary

1st logical

Disk 2:

1st primary

1st, 2nd, 3rd 4th logical

CD1 (DVD);

CD2 (CD-RW);

I put this is this form becuse it is not really hardware, and it is more about Windows XP then just software.

[Dustinwmew]

does anyone know how haveing more then one primary per-drive does to the lettering?

[jaclaz]

Most probably you were looking for this info:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...&NoWebContent=1

and this might be useful too:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=227707

In your case it should go like this:

Disk 1:
1st primary                   <-if ACTIVE gets letter C:
2nd primary                   <-this one is ignored, or skipped, then assigned J:
                                (but not always, depends on which system/which filesystem)
1st logical                      <-this one is skipped at first pass, then becomes E:

Disk 2:
1st primary                    <-gets letter D:
1st, 2nd, 3rd 4th logical   <-these are skipped at first pass, then become F:,G:,H:,I:

CD1 (DVD);                   <-finally gets letter J: or K: (see above)
CD2 (CD-RW);               <-finally gets letter K: or L: (see above)

It is NOT RECOMMENDED to have more than one PRIMARY partition visible to NT/2K/XP.

Moreover, the best thing is to plan the partitioning so that Dos/Windows and NT/2K/XP give the same letters to the same drives.

Hope the above helps.

jaclaz