I could be wrong, but I don't believe your bios cares what letter is on any given
drive. You
do however, need to tell it where your MBR resides. That's why you can boot from a
floppy
disk or a zip drive. It doesn't need to know which comes first (c,d,e,f,etc), it just
needs
the path from itself to the ide channel (master or slave) to the place where the boot
files
live. Is that making any sense? To the best of my knowledge, c,d,e,f etc. is just
Bill's
creation. Since most people use windows, the bios just uses the language more people
are
familiar with when it asks you what drive letter you want to boot from. Once Windows
gets
booted, if it doesn't see any M$ compatible partitions behind it, it will see it self
as "c"
drive. You can try this experiment (if you have the software laying around). Load
partition
magic and resize your Windows partition to leave about 50megs empty at the FRONT of
your
drive. Install a copy of Dos 6 and Windows 3 or equivalent and use lilo to boot
everything.
You should have something like this:
/dev/hda1 = dos
/dev/hda2 = windows
/dev/hda3 = linux
If you don't have lilo installed on that computer, you can use your windows rescue
disk and
fdisk to set the active partition. Now if you boot into Win3, you shouldn't see the
Win98
partition because win3 uses FAT16 and therefore wouldn't understand the file table.
If you
boot Win98, Win3 will just look like a simple dos partition and therefore be given the
drive
letter 'd' and your root partition or 'c' will be the Win98 system. Neither one will
see
Linux, but Linux will know right where each of them are (/dev/hda1, etc.)
I guess all that was just to say that drive letters are not set in stone on your hard
ware.
Windows will always see itself as the main OS and therefore no matter where you put
it, it
will always see itself as 'c'.
Tell me if that makes sense, eh? I'm starting to get cross-eyed!
Mike
Jaguar wrote:
> Well in my way of thinking...the BIOS assigns Drive letters weather there is a
> filesystem on it or not...changing the Windows C: installed drive to somewhere
> else in the chain, will still produce the file not found errors because the
> drive is now assigned Drive D or more, and the installed drive was previously
> C:, depending on the chain
> PM IDE=C <--- of course drive letters will change with mulitple.....
> PS IDE=D partitions per drive
> SM IDE=E
> SS IDE=F
> Now with modern BIOS's you can set to boot from A or C or D or CD-ROM or SCSI,
> etc...using that may help the process...
> But once Windows is installed to a drive...the Regisrty uses that as the path
> to where the files are located.
> HTH
> Jaguar
>
--
========================================================
The Penguins are coming!!!
========================================================
Michael Holt
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
