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Thread ID: 45178	2004-05-12 23:20:00	How to know which hard drive is which?	rugila (214)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
236050	2004-05-12 23:20:00	Please read details below before jumping in with a quick answer. After all, don’t we all find it easy to identify our hard drive(s)? Or do we?? Have windows computer with 3 physical hdd’s , 80GB, 120GB and 2.1GB. The 80GB has two equal partitions, the others are unpartitioned (or have one partition each if one looks at it that way). I installed them as primary master, primary slave and secondary slave respectively, and the BIOS correctly identifies them as such (also correctly identifies the makes and models). Secondary master is a CD drive. When it comes to boot order of preference, the BIOS allows setting of HDD-0, HDD-1, HDD-2 and HDD-3 (plus SCSI, ZIP USB, LAN etc) as whichever of first, second or 3rd priority I want to choose. When it comes to the boot.ini file(s) these have things like multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" etc. Now how to find out the relationship between say secondary master, HDD-3 and disk(0) and rdisk(0) and partition(*) (to say nothing of C:, D:, E:, F:, et al) etc? without going to trial-and-error which is a messy and time-consuming job. Also does disk(0) in the boot.ini in the root directory of HDD-1 refer to the same disk as disk(0) in the boot.ini of HDD-2 and what changes if I change the boot order in the BIOS and/or in the boot.ini file(s)? As for OS, the 2.1GB drive has WinXP home and Win 98 installed in different folders. One partition of the 80GB drive has WinXP home (from a different original disk, but both legally paid for by me and activated etc.) and the other partition has WinXP Pro (file system here is Fat32). The 120GB disk has NTFS file system and no OS. Now this is a bizarre setup that arose partly through historical reasons that I don’t want to go into, and partly because the chronic instability of XP home kept bugging me with what I was using the machine for. All I want is a consistent method of identifying my hard drives by matching up the various terminologies used (with the ultimate aim of sorting out the mess). Naturally I have studied the Microsoft KB without much joy (although maybe, like marine salvage, the answer is in there – somewhere). Any suggestions? (I would appreciate suggestions additional to the most obvious one of deleting/reformatting/reinstalling the whole mess and starting again. I have some pretty important stuff in there that I don’t want to lose and which is currently scattered through the 150GB or so of disk space used up so far.)	rugila (214)
236051	2004-05-13 00:03:00	I take it you are dual/multi booting and that XP pro was the last OS installed. (to avoid problems you install the latest, most uptodate OS last). I also take it that your "important stuff" is data and is not so dependent on the OS that it can't be backed up as data and shifted around. rdisk = Emergency Repair disk? Assuming XP pro to be your default OS. Have you gone to: right click My Computer > Manage > Computer Management (or Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management) Disk Management. All your HDD's (disk 0, disk 1, etc,) will be listed there and aligned to any partitions (C, D, E, F, etc,) active or otherwise. It might be handy to have your XP pro partition formated in NTFS so you can manage all the data from that OS although, you state that you don't want to get into changing the basic setup of your drives (partitions). I think you might have to bite the bullet and sort it out before some MS patch or other glitch does it for you. Cheers Murray P	Murray P (44)
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