1.Installed Fujitsu 13 Gb-AT HD, as Pri Master...drive letter "C" Then installed Mats---a DVD Rom as Sec Master...Drive letter "D" Then, installed Maxtor 30 Gb as Pri Slave on (end connector of ribbon ... Drive Letter "E" My question, doesn't the two Primary master and slave HD's go C and D and the DVD Rom go the next letter "E" Everything works, Just have never seen anything other than HD's first then the last letters denoting the Secondary drives. A small thing but a little bug I don't know. Thanks for taking the time. Jim

Its not a bug, its the way it was designed to work. Drive letters have nothing to do with the position of the drives on the cable, whether they are primary or secondary, slave or master. It just happens that at times it seems to follow that convention but it is purely incidental. Drive letters are allocated by the Operating System every time the computer boots. Before that, drive letters do not exist. They are allocated in the order of Primary partitions first starting with C. Once all primary partitions are allocated next come extended partitions and logical drives. Therefore Drive C could be on the first disk. Drive D on the second disk and drive a logical drive within and extended partition the first drive could be drive E. Once they have been allocated letters Optical drives get allocated letters. Finally any other drives like USB drives get allocated letters. Since Windows XP it has been possible to allocate particular letters to particular drives which will be kept between boots with the exception of the boot and system drives. But if another drive is added, or another partition on and existing drive, then letter allocation will follow the above description. Stuart

jb Should you desire to, you CAN reassign the drive letters for any drives in your system EXCEPT the C: drive. If you wish to do this right click My computer> Manage> Storage> Disk Management. If you want to reassign a letter that is already in use simply temporarily assign an unused letter to the drive using the desired letter. Then repeat until all are as desired.

jb I should have added that this only works for Win2K & WinXP.

Drive letters can also be reassinged in Win95, Win98, ME, and NT.

GerryC I would be interested in knowing how to reassign drive letters in Win98se.

You can assign CD drive letters in DOS/w3-9 with MSCDEX. Assigning HD letters in DOS can get very dodgy. I always assign CD as R in DOS and NT so when I slip in another HD, the CD letter doesn't go squishing away. I agree with StuartS, but that doesn't quite account for the second HD getting E:. Maybe the CD was assigned D and it stayed put. ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2