1) Is there a way to nominate an additional hard drive, in an MS-DOS/Windows type system, to be the last drive letter, ie, not automatically Drive D (but, for example, possibly G or H)?
2) When I fdisked my system hard drive I allowed 250Mb for a unix/linux-type partition. Therefore only approximately 0.75%+ is actually a DOS-type partition. Can I add in the non-allocated space without trashing what is already on the active DOS partition and various extended partitions?
- Veeto
1) I am not sure this is your problem but hopefully this advice will be of some assistance. Suppose you have two partitions on your master hard disk drive called C: and D: and you add a second disk drive with a single partition on it to the computer. Whether the new hard drive is assigned the drive letter D: or the drive letter E: will depend upon how you have partitioned the second hard drive. With fdisk you can create either a primary DOS partition or an extended DOS partition. For the master drive you need one primary DOS partition to contain the system files; this becomes Drive C. Any additional extended DOS partitions are assigned subsequent letters. On the second drive any extended DOS partitions are added on after the master drive's drive letters. However, if you have a primary DOS partition on the second drive it will always be assigned Drive D.
2) Using fdisk you can create new partitions in unallocated space without losing any data in the partitions that already exist. What you cannot do is resize partitions. If you need to, you can use software such as PartitionMagic, to resize partitions without loss of data.
- Roy Chambers
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Category: Hardware
Issue: Mar 1997
Pages: 171
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The A to Z of hard drives