Drive letters with SATA drives
Ok, I built myself a new system with an Asus P5WDG2 WS Pro motherboard. I have two IDE DVD drives, and two SATA 160gig hard drives (set up in RAID 0 config). I also have a multi USB card reader which shows up as 4 drives.
I went to instal XP pro, and when all was installed, I noticed that my system drive is I:, not C:... C: & D: were the optical drives, E, F, G, H are the USB card drives.....
I can unplug the USB card reader and one of the optical drives, but then my main system drive would still be D:, not C:
For the most part, I don't care. The only problem was something that gets installed for my HP scanner hard codes to install to C:. Simple fix, just made a shortcut subst c: i:\ and put that in my startup folder.
But to be on the safe side for the future in case I run across any other poorly written software, I'd like to try to reinstall and get it to be drive C:. I have files in use that need to be on drive D: to match how I use them on another system, and can again do another subst commad to mimic my J: drive (my "data" drive), but rather not do it.
So, if anyone has suggestions on how to do this? Everything I found in searches on how to change the drive letter of your system drive is (in big bold letters LOL) only if it has somehow changed from the original letter.
The only thing I can think of is buy a SATA DVD drive to do the install as on my motherboard, the IDE connector gets the drive letters before the SATA drives....
Also, while speaking of SATA, as this is my first system with them (other than a store bought system that is preconfiged), this mother board has two different SATA controllers on it:
From ASUS Spec page wrote: Intel ICH7R controller supports:
- 4 x SATA 3.0Gb/s (RAID 0,1,10,5)
- 1 x UltraDMA 133/100
Marvell 88SE614x supports:
- 4 x SATA 3.0Gb/s
Anyone know what the difference is, which is better? I currently am using the Intel controller...
Thanks in advance for any help.
-Greg
Greg K posted this at 00:22 — 12th March 2007.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
haven't been able to find much info on a way around this. I went and ordered 2 320gig SATA drives to use as data drives, and got a SATA DVD ROM for $20. Hopefully with that hooked up, my SATA 160's will register as drive C
-Greg
aka Rohan posted this at 07:57 — 12th March 2007.
He has: 200 posts
Joined: Feb 2006
I'm pretty sure that you can select the dive letter when you install XP. I remember the last time I did it I just shot through the install process and ended up with all the system files on drive F (I've got 2 hard drives, dvd-rw, and a couple of card readers). I just reinstalled XP and made sure the correct drive letter was selected the second time.
There is a way to change the drive letters without reinstalling a believe but I couldn't get it to work... also I didn't want to risk messing up any registries e.t.c. which would no doubt cause a major problem months down the line when I've got lots of important stuff installed on my PC. Three cheers for Windows!
Greg K posted this at 08:02 — 13th March 2007.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
Sigh, I tried to also install Suse Linux, but it warned against installing on a RAID setup, saying the raid settings and all data on the raid drives would be lost
Since this system recognizes USB drives right from boot up as a SCSI drive, I was able to have linux install on a 80 gig USB drive. However after GRUB installed, I had to manually add an entry for windows so I could boot to windows again, and then it all crashes out unless the USB drive is plugged in at startup... LOL
This is not a permanent option, this system is too danged fast to bottleneck it on a USB drive
I'm playing around with different things now, since I will most likely be reinstalling windows. It looks like even though I cannot select the physical drives, it will let me pick the partition made on the raid drives when windows was setup, so going to see about putting linux there...
-Greg
Greg K posted this at 01:49 — 15th March 2007.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
Ok well a little update for anyone else who may come across this issue.
I noticed on trying to install Linux, although it said about having problems with using a raid drive, if I went into expert mode, it seemed like it would let me use the partition that already existed with windows, so I figured I'd toss in the WinXP disk again, and let it create another primary partition with windows, then I would blow it away an put on linux.. (that ended up not working).
However, when I got to where you select where to install windows, to my amazement, it asked if I just wanted to repair C:\WINDOWS
What the heck? when I boot to windows, Windows is on Drive I:.....
I guess as long as a partiton on the RAID already exists, it will be the first drive letter before IDE DVD drives or USB card readers. So I went and did a reinstall of windows, using drive C: this time. It worked, when all done windows was in fact on C:.
I decided to test this, I blew away the raid settings, re-created the raid settings, and reinstalled windows... Drive I: again.
So I again redid the raid settings, let it try to set up as I:\WINDOWS to create the initial partition. When the system did the reboot, instead of letting Setup continue, I had it start over again, andonce again, since the partition already existed let it be C:.... Didn't need to buy a SATA DVD drive after all. Oh well, I'll keep it on the shelf.
So now I have properly set up windows (ok stop laughing you linux/mac users) on Drive C.
Now for the linux gurus here.... Do you know what I can do to get it to properly work with the RAID controller listed on the other post here? I would still like to get a copy of that running as well on my system.
Thank you for your help.
-Greg
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