Multiple drives, many partitions, & network?

[Dinosaur]

I am building a new system with 3 hard drives, a CD reader, and a CD-RW.
I intend to have 10-15 partitions on the three drives. I am going to copy various CD applications to my hard drives so I will not have to keep changing CD's, which is the primary reason for so many partitions. There will be one partition for each CD application.

I am going to network the new system with my old system, which has 5 partitions on three drives and a CD reader. I intend to install the network cards now, but not connect the two systems for a month or two. Might this be a problem?

Does anybody has thoughts about what drive letters to assign to the CD and CD-RW drives? On a system I had 5-6 years ago, I assigned "X" to my CD, but some programs seemed to insist that it be the next drive letter after my last hard drive partition. I am hoping that Windows 98 Second edition will handle this better than the original Windows 95 OS.

My main concern is the CD & CD-RW drive letters changing when I add partitions and/or when I network the two systems.

Any advice, comments, et cetera will be appreciated.

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Gouverneur
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.

[sleddog]

Don't worry about network drives messing up the drive letter assignments. Any network drives will come after the last used drive letter. So if you've used up to G with harddisk partitions, the first network drive connected will be H, or you can specify another letter. Put you network connection in a .bat file with a shortcut to it in the Startup group, rather than trust Windows to figure it out for you http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

e.g.

net use H: \\computername\sharename

For CDROMs, I'd skip a group of letters (leaving them for future HDD partition) and assign the CDROM to, say, M. I had a system setup like this and never had a problem.


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sleddog
[sleddog.f2s.com] (http://www.sleddog.f2s.com)

[tjaymadison]

The best way to keep CD-ROM drive letter designations from being changed is to assign them in Device Manager after a fresh install of Windows before installing any other software. If you install applications first and then re-assign a drive letter, you'll get error messages. You can keep your hard drive partition letters "in order" by FDISKing the additional drives to be logical in extended partitions. There's an excellent section in The PC Guide about this. BTW, simply copying applications from CD to HD will not allow you to run them, but there are "virtual" CD programs that will. Or you could get a CD jukebox, but they're pretty pricey.

[Dinosaur]

Thanx for the advice, folks.

tjaymadison: I have heard that some poorly coded applications insist on accessing the CD when you try to run them.

I have several friends whose systems have far more hard drive space than they need. On several of these systems, I have put CD applications on a hard drive. I merely copied the CD to a newly created empty partition, and then ran the install/setup program from the hard drive. If the application has already been installed from the CD, you should uninstall it.

I will try to remember to post in this forum when I put CD applications on the hard drives in my new system. If I am successful, I might forget to post. If any or all CD applications fail to run from my hard drive, I will probably remember to post, because the suprise and disappointment will jog my memory of this post.

A knowledgeable friend of mine reported that he had an application for which the above did not work. We assume that the application used a CD API or did machine code CD reads instead of using an API which accepts Path/Filename, thus allowing OS to figure out what the device is. Some game (or other) software might have an anti-piracy mechanism which would prevent running from a hard drive.

BTW: I remember DOS software that used machine code to write floppy and/or hard drive sectors that could not be read via the DOS API. Something like this was used in the original Lotus spreadsheet application for DOS. These anti-piracy schemes became nightmares, and were sometimes worse than a virus. Similar schemes for modern CD applications would not cause the same problems, and might be in use.

I would advise using Partition Magic or some similar product to make a partition for each CD application, because I suspect that there might be problems if CD application shares a partition with anything else. Partition Magic will shrink the partition to a minimum after the install of the application. The software that displays CD Icon and the autorun program might do something squirrelly if CD application is not in separate partition. Who knows what else might go wrong, since the application does not expect anything else on the CD, and thus would not expect anything else in the partition.



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Gouverneur
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.