Hello all.

This is more of a question rather than a problem since everything is working but I don't understand the drive letter assignment by Windows XP Home.

Originally I had a CD-ROM drive D: (master) and a CD-RW E: (slave) on the same IDE controller - the only one available. I had my reasons for the master/slave assignment - I had a stripped screw head and couldn't remove the CD-ROM. That has since been fixed.

I replaced the CD-RW with a DVD-RW, set the jumpers on the drives to have the DVD-RW as master but the drive letters remain D: CD-ROM and E: is the DVD-RW. My BIOS reflects the way the drives are jumpered - the DVD is master and CD-ROM slave, yet Windows insists the drive letters be asigned in reverse. I tried re-cabling and anything else I could think of to change it. I guess there is something I don't know about.

Why? :confused:

Thanks as always!!

Windows XP I believe remembers the drive letter assignments so if you assigned a device to drive letter, it will save that device. Hard drives also worj the same. I don't know about the primary boot partition, but all other drives/partations can be changed to whataver you want depending on the lastdrive letter you have available.

As I said not a problem, just one of those things that bug me, thanks Classic.

For removable drives like CD/DVD you should be able to reassign the letters.

You would probably need to make it a 3 step process of assigning the CD drive a letter like M, then assign the DVD-RW to D, then the CD to E.

I have not tried win xp coz of its system requirements. but i think drive letter assignments can be changed thru the device manager. I often do this in win 98se.

Thanks all.

You can juggle any drive-letter asignments EXCEPT THE SYSTEM AND BOOT PARTITIONS. Every device and each partition has or is given a unique id which is stored in the registry (eg HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices) and which is just one place where the association between the assigned drive letter and that "volume" is correlated and maintained for future reference. Windows only reassigns these itself if a conflict arises in the future.

Changing Master/Slave configurations does nothing in this regard because this doesn't change the device's ID.

RClick MyComputer | Manage | Disk Management is where you can reassign the letters in Win2K or WinXP.

AFAIK, under Win9X/ME, the assignments are made dynamically by windows and they can later be hidden, even possibley remapped to an additional letter, but not re-assigned as such.

Much appreciated Paul!

Forgot to mention what may be obvious and which is probably irrelevant to Optical Devices, is that changing letters can mean you need to remap all the references to the old drive letter in your system. Partition Magic has such a utility bundled with it and there may be other freebies out there should this ever create problems.