Drive Lettering for Partitions

[Trainor68]

Here is my question (3 parts):

1. Can I have more than ONE primary partion on a SINGLE hard drive?

2. Let's say I have dual booting--Win 98 on one primary partition (C http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif, and WinNT on a second p.p. (D http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif. If I choose to boot to WinNT, will that drive then show up as C:\?

3. Will I be able to see my WinNT drive from Win98, since it is a different FAT system?

Somewhere I've read that your boot drive will be drive C, but then it doesn't make sense to always have drives changing letter based on what system you're booting to... http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif.

Last Point--I've read ALOT of the PC Guide, but I'm still unclear on Question #2. Any quick help would be appreciated!

[bassman]

Hello Trainor, and welcome.
Lets see if I can answer your 3 part Q in 1 part http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif
Yes you can have more than 1 Primary partition. With FAT 16 or 32 you can have a total of 4 primary and secondary partitions, and then a number of logical drives within those.
C: will be your Primary "Active" which is "boot partition" and carries the info to boot up your system.
If you want to share files between NT and 98 on the same machine, you will need to install NT with FAT (16 is the only choice).
No, it does not change drive letters when you boot to the other system.

Hmmmm, not sure if that counts as 1 part or not http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

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[Trainor68]

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/cool.gif OK, since I can have 4 primary partitions, does the "extended" partition count as 1 out of the 4 (I know the logicals wouldn't).

To get it clear in my mind:

I have Win 98 on C (primary partition), WinNT on D (primary partition)--all on the same hard drive. If I boot up to Win 98 (C drive), I can't see the D drive with WinNT unless it has FAT16 installed. If I boot to WinNT (D drive), I will see the D drive labeled as D:\, and I will not be able to see my C drive unless I have FAT16 enabled under WinNT.

Hope this is right. Thanks for your help bassman!

[Dinosaur]

Yes you can have more than one primary partition on a hard drive. Drive letter assignment is done as follows.

Primary partitions are assigned C, D, E as required. I am not sure where D is in a two drive wystem with two primaries on the first physical disk. I think it is the second primary on the first physical disk, but it might be the first on the second disk.

After all primaries have been assigned letters. The logical Drives in extended partitions are assigned the next letters. All Logicals on the first physical disk are assigned letters first; Then all logicals on the second physical disk; Et cetera.

If you intend to add partitions or install new physical disks, you should be aware of the drive letter assignment algorithm. You can avoid most problems when installing an additional physical disk by making all of its partitions logical drives in an extended partition. None of the already assigned letters will be reassigned, which could happen if you put a primary partition on the next physical disk.

I am not sure about NT, but most operating systems require the use of the C-Drive. If you have more than one primary partition, the second primary becomes D and unusable for the OS.

There are utilities (Partition Magic, Boot Magic, System Commander) which allow running a multiple OS system by hiding a primary partition.

I am running Windows 98SE and DOS6.22/Windows3.11 (with a partition reserved for OS/2 Warp)using Partition Magic and Boot Magic. When I run Win98, the DOS6.22 Partition is hidden and not accessible. When I run DOS/Win3.11, the Win98 partition is hidden. Boot Magic handles the hiding and unhiding of partitions, which would be a pain to do manually.

OS/2 Warp can be installed almost anywhere, but something like Boot Magic is still handy. I am guessing that Win NT can run from a partition other than Primary C.

There is a dual Boot capability that I have heard about, but never used. If allows booting one OS from the other. I think that the last one used is activated when you shut down and restart. I use Boot magic becaue it will handle more that two OS, and I do not think Dual Boot will (not sure about this).

BTW: Hidden is a special partition status. It should not be confused with a partition seen by the OS due to the File Structure. For example, OS/2 Warp uses HPFS partitions, which cannot be seen by DOS or Windows 9x. A Windows 9x FAT32 partition cannot be seen by DOS or OS/2 Warp. The old DOS FAT16 (plain FAT) partitions can be seen by almost any OS.

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

[yawningdog]

I'm not sure this is pertinent, but it occurs to me, so...

I dual boot win 98 and linux redhat7. Win 98 does not see the redhat partition. XLS files can be read in either OS.

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Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to use the net, and he wont bother you for weeks.

[Trainor68]

Dinosaur:

Thanks for some clarification. Let me follow-up with another question. On your system, when you boot to Win 98, it is labeled as C drive? If so, when you boot to DOS/Win 3.1, is it labeled as as C drive as well? If not, what is it labeled as?

Thanks for your help (or anyones).

[Dinosaur]

Trainor68: Both the primaries on my First physical disk are C-Drives when active.

When Windows 98 is active, the DOS 6.22 partition is a hidden primary which does not get a drive letter assigned to it. When DOS 6.22 is active, the Windows 98 primary is hidden and has no letter assigned.

The Active OS is always in a C-Drive.

Boot Magic takes care of hiding and unhiding the partitions as required. When my system boots, I get a Boot Magic Menu asking which OS I want to use. If I do not respond in 30 seconds (adjustable), a default choice (assigned by me) is made by Boot magic.

I used Partition magic to set the system up. I am currently running only DOS 6.22 and Windows 98, but intend to install OS/2 Warp which I liked years ago. It is too bad that it lost the battle with Windows 9x. It was a more stable system and better in many ways. It looked a lot like Windows 9x. Boot Magic is included when you buy Partition Magic (about $49.00 to $69.00, American).

I might run Windows XP with Windows 98 and DOS next year.

Partition Magic is a remarkable utility , even if you do not run a multiple OS system. I recently reorganized both my systems. I added several partitions, resized/moved others. It knows how to deal with OS/2 Warp, NT, Windows 9x, DOS 6.22, Lunix, and probably a few other types of partitions. It moves and/or resizes without losing any data. It will convert one type of partition into another type (some conversions lose the data).

I have several CD applications that run without the CD because I created a partition for each and copied each CD to a separate partition. I then installed the applications from the hard drive. BTW: This can be done with some applications (EG: Rand McNally Millennium Atlas and Britannica Encyclopedia), but not others (EG: American Heritage Talking Dictionary).

As my requirements change, I use Partition Magic to reorganize my system. For example, I was having trouble with Disk defrag due to a few huge Drive Image Files used for backup. I solved the problem by creating a new partition which contains only the huge files. When I discovered that some CD applications could be run from a hard drive, I decreased the size of a big partition, obtaining the space to create two 600MB partitions for the CD applications. Partition Magic makes it easy to do this sort of reorganization.

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