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Re: Req: Disk layout advice
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Jeff Gaines
Nov 9, 2013, 11:05:42 AM11/9/13
to
On 09/11/2013 in message <o0ls79hb2quv28a3l...@4ax.com>
Anthony R. Gold wrote:
>I've never before used a logical partition and would appreciate advice. If
>I
>were to change two or all three of my non-system data primary partitions
>into logical partitions on an extended partition, how will the system
>behave
>differently from when they were primary? Is there anything different I
>would
>notice in the computer's behaviour if some or all of my data partitions
>were
>no longer primaries, or would all of the differences remain under the hood
>and unnoticeable to the user?
You wouldn't notice any difference, not sure about converting though - you
may have to delete and start again. Mini Tool Partition Wizard is good
(and free):
http://partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html
I have only ever had one primary partition with everything else on logical
drives. For me it arose when booting between a variety of OS's - it was
bloody annoying when drive letters changed because, for instance, I had
left a zip drive with a primary partition in place.
--
Jeff Gaines Wiltshire UK
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
(Ken Olson, president Digital Equipment, 1977)
Anthony R. Gold wrote:
>I've never before used a logical partition and would appreciate advice. If
>I
>were to change two or all three of my non-system data primary partitions
>into logical partitions on an extended partition, how will the system
>behave
>differently from when they were primary? Is there anything different I
>would
>notice in the computer's behaviour if some or all of my data partitions
>were
>no longer primaries, or would all of the differences remain under the hood
>and unnoticeable to the user?
You wouldn't notice any difference, not sure about converting though - you
may have to delete and start again. Mini Tool Partition Wizard is good
(and free):
http://partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html
I have only ever had one primary partition with everything else on logical
drives. For me it arose when booting between a variety of OS's - it was
bloody annoying when drive letters changed because, for instance, I had
left a zip drive with a primary partition in place.
--
Jeff Gaines Wiltshire UK
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
(Ken Olson, president Digital Equipment, 1977)
Message has been deleted
Jeff Gaines
Nov 9, 2013, 4:12:29 PM11/9/13
to
On 09/11/2013 in message <814t79l66seridm9c...@4ax.com>
Anthony R. Gold wrote:
>Only one? Can the system boot disk also be merely a logical one too? I had
>never even considered that possibility.
Windows needs a primary partition for some files but the rest of the files
can be on a logical drive. Depends what you plan to use as a boot manager
- some of them hide drives which can be fun.
>When you had drifting drive letters, was that because the zip was mounted
>first and before the logical ones or was the later mounting of the zip able
>to cause already mounted logical drives to change their letters?
It's because most OS's follow the old DOS convention - allocate drive
letters to all primary partitions first (in the order the drives are
connected to he MOBO) then go back and pick up the logical drives in
extended partitions. Once booted you could put a zip drive in and the
letters wouldn't change.
--
Jeff Gaines Wiltshire UK
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
(Bill Gates, 1981)
Anthony R. Gold wrote:
>Only one? Can the system boot disk also be merely a logical one too? I had
>never even considered that possibility.
Windows needs a primary partition for some files but the rest of the files
can be on a logical drive. Depends what you plan to use as a boot manager
- some of them hide drives which can be fun.
>When you had drifting drive letters, was that because the zip was mounted
>first and before the logical ones or was the later mounting of the zip able
>to cause already mounted logical drives to change their letters?
It's because most OS's follow the old DOS convention - allocate drive
letters to all primary partitions first (in the order the drives are
connected to he MOBO) then go back and pick up the logical drives in
extended partitions. Once booted you could put a zip drive in and the
letters wouldn't change.
--
Jeff Gaines Wiltshire UK
(Bill Gates, 1981)
Message has been deleted
Jeff Gaines
Nov 10, 2013, 3:57:30 AM11/10/13
to
On 09/11/2013 in message <nadt79l75115rb3tq...@4ax.com>
Anthony R. Gold wrote:
>Thanks, I'll remember to leave spares before any logical lettering. But to
>be clear, if I am running with logicals and then mount a portable device
>with a primary, will that act of mounting cause the already mounted and
>lettered logicals to be relocated on the fly?
Once you're booted then drive letters allocated at boot won't change.
--
Jeff Gaines Wiltshire UK
You can't tell which way the train went by looking at the tracks
Anthony R. Gold wrote:
>Thanks, I'll remember to leave spares before any logical lettering. But to
>be clear, if I am running with logicals and then mount a portable device
>with a primary, will that act of mounting cause the already mounted and
>lettered logicals to be relocated on the fly?
Once you're booted then drive letters allocated at boot won't change.
--
Jeff Gaines Wiltshire UK
Message has been deleted
Johny B Good
Nov 10, 2013, 7:15:34 AM11/10/13
to
On Sat, 09 Nov 2013 15:43:42 +0000, "Anthony R. Gold"
<not-fo...@ahjg.co.uk> wrote:
>I am running Windows XP and using a hard drive with 4 primary partitions
>(one for the system and three for data) which I believe is the maximum
>number possible. In anticipation of the ending of XP support I wish to start
>playing with a newer OS, probably Windows 7 Pro 32, by adding that in its
>own bootable primary partition and so, as I understand it, something will
>have to give.
I'm guessing you've never had to set up an MSDOS based multi HDD
system from scratch before (including win95/win98/winME).
Whilst NT5.0 and on (possibly also true for earlier versions of NT)
allows you to re-allocate drive letters to all bar the system boot
partition after installation, I still tend to create only a single
primary partition (the system, drive C, volume) on a system that has 2
or more disks installed.
The rule is that you can have, as you've already said, a maximum of
four partitions on each drive. What you might not be aware of is that
only the last of these partitions can be an extended partition, even
if it's the _only_ partition.
With dos based OSen (no post install HDD drive letter re-assignment
feature other than for optical drives), the safest way to split the
partition space up on the additional drive(s) was to create _only_ an
extended dos partition within which to create your logical disk
volume(s) otherwise you could find that adding an extra HDD with a
primary partition would 'bump' your logical drive D to the next
available letter (typically E in most cases).
In essence, by only using a single extended dos partition on the
additional drives, you could prevent your logical drive D in the
extended partition of your first HDD from getting bumped to a later
drive letter when adding extra drive(s).
AFAIAA, it's still true that you can't make a disk bootable if it
only has an extended dos partition so it can be useful to partition
any external removable data storage drives with only an extended
partition space (usually with just the one logical disk volume
occupying all of the partition space).
Since you've shown an interest in keeping drive letter assignments
arranged to suit your own purpose, rather than simply leaving it all
to chance, I offer this suggestion for you to ponder.
With winXP, as I've already mentioned, you can reassign drive letters
for all drives other than the system (usually drive C) post install
(including card reader slots[1]) so you can make sure of an unbroken
alphabetical sequence for all the internally connected HDDs starting
with C and up.
You usually have to re-assign the optical drive a new drive letter to
free up D before re-arranging HDD letter assignments. A good rule for
this is to assign the letter R for a cd/dvd rom and the letter W for a
re-writer (in practice, it's usually W for the one and only optical
drive which has write/re-write abilities - DVD or Blu-Ray).
I re-assign the 4 card reader slots to the letters STUV and remote
drive mappings from, in my case, the NAS to JKLM. Incidently, you can
name the card reader slots so that they reflect which type of card
media they take (in my case, for example, S is labelled "SD Slot", T
is "CF Slot" and so on).
This helps avoid confusion when using the various media card slots. I
suspect that most of us will very rarely use media other than SD so
will manage nicely without such an aide memoire but it can be handy to
avoid confusion on those rare occaisions that you might find yourself
using other media types. The saying "If A Job Is Worth Doing, It's
Worth Doing Well" seems appropriate here.
Plugging in external drives (USB and e-SATA) will, by default, be
assigned the first unused letter in the alphabetical sequence. You can
re-assign these drive letter mappings if you wish and provided the new
drive letter in question isn't already in use by another external
drive, subsequent attachments of that drive will be re-assigned that
original drive letter.
In my case, the available drive letters are I, N, O, P, Q, R, Y and Z
( I have a couple of DVD re-writers in the system - W & X). Typically,
when I connect a drive taken from a faulty laptop/desktop machine, it
will show up as drive I, often I for the not hidden rescue partition
and N for the "C drive" volume. Even here, the anarchic drive letter
assignments still have some semblence of order so there's very little
chance of confusion when tackling risky jobs (such as reformatting an
external drive or using unetbootin to make a USB thumb drive bootable
with a *nix distro).
[1] The win2k installer has the unfortunate habit of assigning drive
letters to card reader slots before assigning them to HDDs so, if you
forget to disconnect that 4 slot card reader, you could land up with
windows installed on drive H (CDEF for the card slots and G for the
optical drive -BTDT>BTS).
The quick work around is usually to disable the USB interface in the
BIOS setup if you're using P/S2 keyboard/mouse connections otherwise
you need to open the case and unplug the card reader until after the
installation has completed.
--
Regards, J B Good
<not-fo...@ahjg.co.uk> wrote:
>I am running Windows XP and using a hard drive with 4 primary partitions
>(one for the system and three for data) which I believe is the maximum
>number possible. In anticipation of the ending of XP support I wish to start
>playing with a newer OS, probably Windows 7 Pro 32, by adding that in its
>own bootable primary partition and so, as I understand it, something will
>have to give.
>
>I've never before used a logical partition and would appreciate advice. If I
>were to change two or all three of my non-system data primary partitions
>into logical partitions on an extended partition, how will the system behave
>differently from when they were primary? Is there anything different I would
>notice in the computer's behaviour if some or all of my data partitions were
>no longer primaries, or would all of the differences remain under the hood
>and unnoticeable to the user?
>
>Thanks.
>I've never before used a logical partition and would appreciate advice. If I
>were to change two or all three of my non-system data primary partitions
>into logical partitions on an extended partition, how will the system behave
>differently from when they were primary? Is there anything different I would
>notice in the computer's behaviour if some or all of my data partitions were
>no longer primaries, or would all of the differences remain under the hood
>and unnoticeable to the user?
>
I'm guessing you've never had to set up an MSDOS based multi HDD
system from scratch before (including win95/win98/winME).
Whilst NT5.0 and on (possibly also true for earlier versions of NT)
allows you to re-allocate drive letters to all bar the system boot
partition after installation, I still tend to create only a single
primary partition (the system, drive C, volume) on a system that has 2
or more disks installed.
The rule is that you can have, as you've already said, a maximum of
four partitions on each drive. What you might not be aware of is that
only the last of these partitions can be an extended partition, even
if it's the _only_ partition.
With dos based OSen (no post install HDD drive letter re-assignment
feature other than for optical drives), the safest way to split the
partition space up on the additional drive(s) was to create _only_ an
extended dos partition within which to create your logical disk
volume(s) otherwise you could find that adding an extra HDD with a
primary partition would 'bump' your logical drive D to the next
available letter (typically E in most cases).
In essence, by only using a single extended dos partition on the
additional drives, you could prevent your logical drive D in the
extended partition of your first HDD from getting bumped to a later
drive letter when adding extra drive(s).
AFAIAA, it's still true that you can't make a disk bootable if it
only has an extended dos partition so it can be useful to partition
any external removable data storage drives with only an extended
partition space (usually with just the one logical disk volume
occupying all of the partition space).
Since you've shown an interest in keeping drive letter assignments
arranged to suit your own purpose, rather than simply leaving it all
to chance, I offer this suggestion for you to ponder.
With winXP, as I've already mentioned, you can reassign drive letters
for all drives other than the system (usually drive C) post install
(including card reader slots[1]) so you can make sure of an unbroken
alphabetical sequence for all the internally connected HDDs starting
with C and up.
You usually have to re-assign the optical drive a new drive letter to
free up D before re-arranging HDD letter assignments. A good rule for
this is to assign the letter R for a cd/dvd rom and the letter W for a
re-writer (in practice, it's usually W for the one and only optical
drive which has write/re-write abilities - DVD or Blu-Ray).
I re-assign the 4 card reader slots to the letters STUV and remote
drive mappings from, in my case, the NAS to JKLM. Incidently, you can
name the card reader slots so that they reflect which type of card
media they take (in my case, for example, S is labelled "SD Slot", T
is "CF Slot" and so on).
This helps avoid confusion when using the various media card slots. I
suspect that most of us will very rarely use media other than SD so
will manage nicely without such an aide memoire but it can be handy to
avoid confusion on those rare occaisions that you might find yourself
using other media types. The saying "If A Job Is Worth Doing, It's
Worth Doing Well" seems appropriate here.
Plugging in external drives (USB and e-SATA) will, by default, be
assigned the first unused letter in the alphabetical sequence. You can
re-assign these drive letter mappings if you wish and provided the new
drive letter in question isn't already in use by another external
drive, subsequent attachments of that drive will be re-assigned that
original drive letter.
In my case, the available drive letters are I, N, O, P, Q, R, Y and Z
( I have a couple of DVD re-writers in the system - W & X). Typically,
when I connect a drive taken from a faulty laptop/desktop machine, it
will show up as drive I, often I for the not hidden rescue partition
and N for the "C drive" volume. Even here, the anarchic drive letter
assignments still have some semblence of order so there's very little
chance of confusion when tackling risky jobs (such as reformatting an
external drive or using unetbootin to make a USB thumb drive bootable
with a *nix distro).
[1] The win2k installer has the unfortunate habit of assigning drive
letters to card reader slots before assigning them to HDDs so, if you
forget to disconnect that 4 slot card reader, you could land up with
windows installed on drive H (CDEF for the card slots and G for the
optical drive -BTDT>BTS).
The quick work around is usually to disable the USB interface in the
BIOS setup if you're using P/S2 keyboard/mouse connections otherwise
you need to open the case and unplug the card reader until after the
installation has completed.
--
Regards, J B Good
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