Disk port mapping from motherboard to Win 7

[chriscalvert]

I have been trying to find how to map SATA ports to physical disks when mapped by Windows 7. I need this information so that when I shift disks from one motherboard to a dis-similar board they will end up in the same hierachy when running Windows 7 (or SBS 2003 or 2008).
I have found by looking at the BIOS SATA ports on one specific Gigabyte motherboard and noting what the BIOS said their function is that Windows does map the ports in a known order. In IDE Legacy mode. An example (fictious but close to what I am seeing) -

Mthd SATA port # Desc Win Disk #
0 SATA 0 Master Disk 0 (usually C: drive)
1 SATA 0 Slave
2 SATA 1 Master Disk 1
3 SATA 1 Slave
4 SATA 2 Master Disk 2
5 SATA 3 Master Disk 3

In other words Windows seems to knock off the Masters first before presumably starting on the Slaves. I have only tried this for 4 drives so far but will experiment further to see if Disk 4 would be mapped to SATA 0 Slave above.

Has anybody done any work in this area or could point me towards further information ?

 

[Hawkeye22]

I'm not sure if you can do this. different motherboards may enumerate devices/disks differently. windows may not enumerate them the same way.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937251

 

[chriscalvert]

I guess this sums it up - "Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section."

I wanted to know if there was any way to be able to work out whether it was possible to swap up to 4 disks between several boxes (with different motherboards) and to be able to preserve the same relationship between them. C: drive always appears to be Disk 0 especially if it is the only one restored (with the other disks powered off). I learnt that one early on. The next 3 are the worry. I think that I can manually work out the destination drives okay after perusing the BIOS.
But I had hoped that there might be some rule (s) that could be applied. This is especially bad if all disks are the same size and new ie haven't yet been formatted or named.

From viewing several kb's I get the distinct feeling that even MS don't know although somebody must have written rules into the software that direct the issueing of disk numbers.