drive number allocation at boot

[Charles V. Rennaker]

All,

I use win2K. I have a five computer home network, I teach computer classes,
however have a problem that seams to defy logic. I had an 80G harddrive in
two partitions, a 15G as C:, a second 4.2G physical harddrive that has been
the D: drive, the remaining 65G results in drive E. I had been using an
external USB external enclosure that supports either a CDROM or a harddrive.
I had been using 13G drive in this enclosure. I decided to swap places with
the 4.2G (drive D:) with the external enclosure that contained the 13G drive
witch registered as the "I drive" along with J,K,L & M. I set the 13G drive
as the SLAVE, the same way I had the 4.2G drive. When I re-booted, a D drive
was not recognized, however an I drive was detected and it was the 13G drive
that was in the external USB enclosure. Then I turned on the external drive,
plugged it into the USB port, and then a D drive appeared.

Normally Microsoft windows assigns drive letters to the primary partition on
each physical drive then the next partition on each physical drive. Before
the swap the primary partition on the 80G drive was the C drive, the Primary
partition on the 4.2G drive was the D drive, the secondary partition on the
Primary drive was the E drive. Why did windows retain the same drive letters
in the swapped positions?

[Charles F. Waltrip]

Does this question have anything to do with VMware? If it does, I would
suspect that the area to investigate would be the Virtual Machine's
mapping of the physical drives (and, of course, their partitions) to the
VM virtual drives.

Post by Charles V. Rennaker
All,
I use win2K. I have a five computer home network, I teach computer classes,
however have a problem that seams to defy logic. I had an 80G harddrive in
two partitions, a 15G as C:, a second 4.2G physical harddrive that has been
the D: drive, the remaining 65G results in drive E. I had been using an
external USB external enclosure that supports either a CDROM or a harddrive.
I had been using 13G drive in this enclosure. I decided to swap places with
the 4.2G (drive D:) with the external enclosure that contained the 13G drive
witch registered as the "I drive" along with J,K,L & M. I set the 13G drive
as the SLAVE, the same way I had the 4.2G drive. When I re-booted, a D drive
was not recognized, however an I drive was detected and it was the 13G drive
that was in the external USB enclosure. Then I turned on the external drive,
plugged it into the USB port, and then a D drive appeared.
Normally Microsoft windows assigns drive letters to the primary partition on
each physical drive then the next partition on each physical drive. Before
the swap the primary partition on the 80G drive was the C drive, the Primary
partition on the 4.2G drive was the D drive, the secondary partition on the
Primary drive was the E drive. Why did windows retain the same drive letters
in the swapped positions?