Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (
More info?)
"Arno Wagner" <me@privacy.net> wrote in message news:c7brqo$25rpq$2@ID-2964.news.uni-berlin.de...
> Previously Richard <rubbish@email.com> wrote:
> > My removeable zip drive is normally J:. Every so often out-of-the-blue it
> > becomes D: in "My Computer" and that then causes problems because
> > all the other drives move up a letter, Data that should go to a partition
> > goes into the partition physically nearer C: Yet, Partition Magic continues
> > to show D: as it normally is, the next partition on my HD up from C:.
>
> The drive letter system is braindead.
> It will assign primary partitions the first few letters, if it finds them.
That is DOS behaviour. Even OSes that don't use DOS use the letter
system and drive letters won't exibit that behaviour in that case.
Similarly when the bios is disabled for some devices and DOS doesn't
see them, that behaviour isn't seen.
> Sometimes
Right, so even you should know that this has nothing to do with the
"letter system".
> even if they are on removable disks.
That behaviour is from DOS, which relies on BIOS which normally
doesn't see removable drives unless by driver addition or by the
fact that they have been made to appear as fixed disk drives.
> One reason this system is MS-only.
>
> A way around is to assign a fixed drive-letter range to the drive
> in the hardware configuration. I used to assign "Z:" to the zip.
Question is, will that help any when the ZIP drive is mistakenly
detected as a fixed diskdrive.
> You need to mark it as removable disk in order
> to be able to do the letter-assigning yourself.
Again, that may not be possible when the drive is already a removable
drive and detected as such.
>
> Arno
> --
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>
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