From: Bob on 08/01/2003
Gonna try this one out on you guys....
Microsoft couldn't answer it!
If I partition Hard Drive 0 (master) on IDE 0 as a "primary" and Hard Drive 1 (slave) on IDE 0 or 1 as an "extended", all is well. And if I partition BOTH drives as "primary" on a first go round, everything is OK but...
When I re-installed XP from scratch... the second "primary" partitioned drive disappears. Now, I go to Admin Utils / Disk Manager.
No go...the drive shows up but I cannot assign it a letter. It will only allow a "dynamic" conversion. I move the drive to another PC with XP and the same thing happens. It appears to me that Win XP does not like 2 seperate drives with primary partitions once you place data on it. If, during a FIRST install of a new drive... it is partitioned as "primary", it will work. Add and delete all the data you want, but take that "primary" partitioned drive full of data and put it in another XP machine and poof! Install XP from scratch and poof again! This has happened to me on several machines when people use a setup program that came with the drive or they don't know the difference between "primary" and "extended".
In Win 95/98 the first primary becomes Drive C and all logicals in the extended become D, E etc. If you add a second drive with a primary, it automatically becomes Drive D (so that the two primary partitions are back to back, followed by the logical on the first drive as E, F then the extended on the second drive would be G, H etc).
With Win XP... the second primary drive is unassignable.
Is this a problem with large drives, or Win XP's inability to handle more than one primary? I'm lost and I hope I haven't confused any of you :)
By the way, it doesn't matter what machine, motherboard, drive make or where on the IDE bus it is... the second primary (all have data on them) becomes unassignable. I haven't tried blanking the drives and re-installing them because almost always, the data on them is needed.
(Please don't mention putting them in a 98 machine and retrieving the data, blanking it then start over the right way... the drives are formatted as NTFS!) Thanks to anyone who can help (or even deciphering this mess!)
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