Partitions

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I have an old hard drive that has one partition, that has data that I am after.

My present system has 2 hard drives, the primary has 2 partitions, C & D, and the second drive has 3, E, F, and G.

My experience has been that if I put the old drive in my current machine, it will see the drive, and consequently re-assign letters to all the partitions. Which is OK, and then I could copy off the data I want.

When I then take the drive out, will the CMOS then revert back to the original letter assignments? What if I have a copy of the CMOS — obtained using the CMOS utility from http://mindprod.com/downloads#CMOS (very effective at save and restore in the past) — and restore the “old” CMOS after drives are “put back”?

Am I wrong, or should this work?

Chuck

Chuck Billow

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if I put the old drive in my current machine, it will see the drive, and consequently re-assign letters to all the partitions

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I think you have answered your own question. When you then swap out the old drive and replace it again with the new drive, the same thing will happen. It’s not the CMOS that assigns drive letters – it’s the operating system.

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if I put the old drive in my current machine, it will see the drive, and consequently re-assign letters to all the partitions

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I think you have answered your own question. When you then swap out the old drive and replace it again with the new drive, the same thing will happen. It’s not the CMOS that assigns drive letters – it’s the operating system.

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Chuck,

I can’t tell from your post if you are talking about replacing one of the current drives with the ‘old’ drive. If you only have one optical device (i.e CD or DVD), you should be able to just install the hard drive on whichever IDE channel has only one device. Even if you have more than one optical device it may be easier to unplug one of these so that you can install the old drive and copy the information to whatever partition you wish.

Joe

--Joe

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Chuck,

I can’t tell from your post if you are talking about replacing one of the current drives with the ‘old’ drive. If you only have one optical device (i.e CD or DVD), you should be able to just install the hard drive on whichever IDE channel has only one device. Even if you have more than one optical device it may be easier to unplug one of these so that you can install the old drive and copy the information to whatever partition you wish.

Joe

--Joe

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Note that you can specifically assign drive letters in Win2K. If you have done so then those drive letters are saved-in the signature, I think. I’ve never looked into the matter so I’m not sure whether or not drive letters automatically assigned are also saved-but it would make sense to me to use the same mechanism regardless of how the drive letters are assigned.

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Note that you can specifically assign drive letters in Win2K. If you have done so then those drive letters are saved-in the signature, I think. I’ve never looked into the matter so I’m not sure whether or not drive letters automatically assigned are also saved-but it would make sense to me to use the same mechanism regardless of how the drive letters are assigned.

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Joe et al:

Thanks to all… I think you all (since you all had different inputs) are right, and that I should be OK…

Regards,
Chuck

With high hope for the future, no prediction is ventured.
— Abraham Lincoln

Chuck Billow

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