Re: involuntary logical drive in extended partition

Hi, bgd.

I'm sorry if I got a little too elementary in that last post. It's hard to tell in a newsgroup sometimes whether I'm talking to an expert who skips some of the obvious steps or a newbie who doesn't know about those things. :>(

1 hd is already in with os up and running.. New hard drive installed, unpartitioned, unformatted as slave.
Disk management formats and partitions the new drive.

I'm with you to here.

The root of the new drive is set active .The boot os drive, also has an active.....
There is no indication that it is anything but a primary partition.

Fine. Still with you, if by "boot os drive" you mean the HD designated as the boot device in the BIOS. (Not what Windows calls the "boot volume", meaning the one that holds the \Windows folder.) This Root on the bootable drive is the System Partition - up to now, at least. You now have TWO Active partitions, one on each HD.

the bootable one is removed.
New drive in the old drives place.

OK. At this point, the old operating system is GONE with the old HD. And so is the old Active partition; there still is an Active partition on the second HD.

XP cd to departition the first partition, to be sure the letter was a C:

"Departition"? Typo? I assume you mean that you removed any existing partition and created a new one covering the entire HD? About the drive letter, read on.

Again no indication that it is anything other than a primary.

OK. Was it marked Active? Apparently not...read on.

I did this because the os has showed up as other drive letters in past scenarios similar.

This is where many users go astray. As it says in the WinXP Resource Kit: "Windows XP Professional and Windows 2000 assign drive letters differently from how Windows 98, Windows Me, and Windows NT 4.0 assign drive letters." Not that those other Windows versions are involved here, but we need to know that the rules have changed - almost silently! :>(

The new rules are in a section titled, "Creating Volumes During Windows XP Professional Setup". My Favorites entry used to go straight to that page, but now it just goes to the top of the RK and we have to "drill down" to get to the right spot. The URL is:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/c12621675.mspx#EGAA

Then go to the item on "Disk Management", then "Managing Volumes During Windows XP Professional Setup", and page down to the "Creating Volumes..." paragraphs. (Also see KB article 234048, "How Windows 2000 Assigns, Reserves, and Stores Drive Letters".)

WinXP Setup now looks at ALL HDs and assigns C: to the first Active partition it finds, even if that partition is on the second or other HD! Many users outgrow their original HD and get a newer, bigger one to replace it. They move the original HD to secondary and plug in the new one as primary master. Then they boot from the WinXP CD and run Setup to install WinXP on the new HD. And they are startled to learn that their new System Partition is F: or G:, not C:! And the only way to fix it is to remove the original (now secondary) HD and leave it disconnected until after WinXP is re-installed on the new HD. Then they can add the old HD as secondary and use Disk Management to organize their drive letters (except the new System and Boot volumes) to suit themselves.

The RK does not seem to anticipate all possibilities, especially the oh-so-common situation just discussed. The part that might have bitten you is the sentence that says, "Although you can specify the size of each basic volume, you cannot specify whether to create a primary partition, extended partition, or logical drive." Then it says that if it finds a single primary partition (like the C: you created), Setup creates an extended partition and a logical drive within it.

If you have only the single new HD connected when you run Setup, drive creation and lettering are much as we've always known it. But if additional drives are connected before Setup, the new rules can take us by surprise.

I went to check about defrag and found that it did indeed become a logical.extended partition along the way.

This seems to confirm that the new rules created that extended partition.

After 10 gb of transfers tweaking and setups.. my final question...
Can I continue to run the OS boot partition as a logical and extended partition?

Yes. WinXP doesn't care whether \Windows is in a primary or logical volume.

It DOES insist that the System Partition be the Active primary partition on the boot device.

So, where do you go from here? My suggestion is to unplug the slave HD, plug in the new HD as primary master, boot from the WinXP CD-ROM and install WinXP on that new HD, into the new primary partition that Setup will have created, marked Active and assigned the letter C:. Then shut down, plug in the other HD as secondary, reboot into WinXP, and use Disk Management to organize your HDs.

If I've misunderstood what you want to do, let me know.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Microsoft Windows MVP

"bgd" <bgd73@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:lsKKf.3243$p02.1771@xxxxxxxxxxx

"R. C. White" <rc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:ehWFuLxNGHA.2668@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi, bgd.

Have you found Disk Management yet? It first appeared in Win2K, 6 years ago this month, but many users - even Windows veterans - have not yet found it. It handles many functions previously done by utilities such as FDISK and Format.exe, including "drive" letter reassignment that was done by Device Manager in Win9x/ME. Perhaps the quickest way to get to Disk Management is to type at WinXP's Run prompt: diskmgmt.msc

In Disk Management, you can arrange the View to suit yourself. I prefer the Volume List at the Top and the Graphical View at the Bottom. And check the very helpful Help file; follow the Related Topics links because it is not written linearly so we have to hop around to find the nuggets.

The terminology here is not always intuitive. As many writers have said, we BOOT from the System Partition and keep the operating SYSTEM files in the Boot Volume. The Status column should show you which volume is Boot, which is System and which one (maybe more if you have multiple HDs) is Active. Only one "status" is shown here for each volume; if the System Partition is also the Boot Volume, then only the (System) label is shown.

Post back with what you see here. Especially, which volumes are System and Boot?

RC

Of course I found disk management.. I too had disk manaegment on win2k BETA 7 years ago.
and 2k... and xp pro and xp home.
Many hard drives later and 7 os's 8 pcs 4 monitors and more junk that i care to remember...
This problem has happened 3 times. System partition is fine, it is indeed a primary.
Could you answer question about leaving os on logical and extended(boot). I found it after os was in, before that.. Nothing told me anything. It is not my error, furthermore, and it ought to be fixed.
To sum it up simply:
1 hd is already in with os up and running.. New hard drive installed, unpartitioned, unformatted as slave.
Disk management formats and partitions the new drive.
<----This is where error must have happened---->
The root of the new drive is set active .The boot os drive, also has an active.....
<------------------------------------------------>
There is no indication that it is anything but a primary partition.
the bootable one is removed.
New drive in the old drives place.
XP cd to departition the first partition, to be sure the letter was a C:
Again no indication that it is anything other than a primary.
I did this because the os has showed up as other drive letters in past scenarios similar.
I went to check about defrag and found that it did indeed become a logical.extended partition along the way.
After 10 gb of transfers tweaking and setups.. my final question...
Can I continue to run the OS boot partition as a logical and extended partition?
Thank You.

.

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