windows showing disk2 as disk0

[jlreich]

I just recently replaced the last PATA hard drive in my system with a SATA. So I now have three SATA hard drives. Everything is working just fine but strangely windows reports disk2 as disk0, 0 as 1 and 1 as 2 in disk management. :confused:

BiNG shows it they way it should be. No swap options are on in BiNG. If I were using swap I would expect this.

Any ideas why, or how I can fix it? Like I said it works fine, it's just very odd.

AMD s939 nForce4 ultra mobo

Disk0 - port 1- SATA II Samsung 160GB - win shows as disk1 - contains BiNG and all OS partitions
Disk1 - port 2 - SATA II Seagate 250GB - win shows as disk2
Disk2 - port 3 - SATA II Seagate 500GB - win shows as disk0

Primary PATA - empty
Secondary PATA - 2x DVD burners

[Paul Komski]

I've never really understood how this enumeration is done by NT-Windows. It appears that it is different now than under Win2K.

Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP perform an in-place reorder operation to optimize PnP. As a result of the reorder operation, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP may enumerate the hard disk on the secondary IDE channel before the hard disk on the primary IDE channel. The hard disk that Setup detects last is listed first.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825668

I think its a 1st, 2nd, 3rd result of a race where even the horses dont know who is going to win.

PS
Perhaps its related to which drives start up the fastest. Just an idea.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/fast-boot.mspx#EJHAC

[jlreich]

The hard disk that Setup detects last is listed first.
Oh OK. Perhaps it detects it last since it is on the last SATA port.

Maybe I will swap the cables around to see, out of curiosity, if it makes any difference.

Another instance of Linux just doing it better and simpler. There is no guessing with Linux. :)

Thanks for your time Paul.

[Paul Komski]

Another instance of Linux just doing it better and simpler.Linux is certainly "almost" straightforward when it comes to partitions but the values of the primary and logical partitions can still throw one out on occasions.

The reason is that the references relate in both instances to the position in the partition table for primaries and the position in the daisy-chain of EMBRs for logicals. Thus hda2 and hda3 are not necessarily the second and third primaries going from the outside to the inside of the disk. They are merely references to wherever partition tables 2 and 3 are pointing. Nor are hda6 and hda7 necessarily increasingly near the centre of the platters they merely relate to the second and third partitions in the logical drives daisy-chain.

The primaries most commonly mirror the partition tables and the logicals most commonly mirror the daisy chain but both can be "out of order" and much head-scratching or worse ensue.

And to be fair I'm not sure how Linux enumerates the hard drives themselves or whether hda is 0x80, hdb is 0x81, etc. The different distros can also be a bit confusing when it comes to delineating other than fixed IDE drives as sda, sdb and so on.

The MS methodology is however far far worse in every equivalent scenario.

[jlreich]

It is true the partition numbers can be confusing. But at least you know hda (or sda) is the first disk and hdb is the second and so on.

With any drive hooked up via USB I would think internal drives would be enumerated first. So the above still stands.

I have Suse installed on this machine but haven't booted to it for some time. Since I now have a dedicated Suse/Ubuntu box just a few feet away there hasn't been much reason to.