Brett Glass to the Rescue: Keep Windows 95 from Scrambling Drive Letters

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Keep Windows 95 from Scrambling Drive Letters

Q: We've just purchased a parallel port HP 7110 CD-RW (CD-rewritable) device to use for general backup. But as soon as we connect this device to any of our PC's (we have standardized on Win 95 OSR2), the drive letters are scrambled. Is there any way under Win 95 to
force drive letters to "stick" to Iomega drives and CD-ROM drives?

Larry Felix

A: By the time I got back to you, you'd already discovered the answer on your own, but it's still worth explaining to readers. Windows 95 will let you reserve a specific drive letter for a drive with removable media (but not, for some reason, one with fixed media) via the WIndows Device Manager. Connect the drive (even if it temporarily gets the wrong letter) and boot the system. Open the Control Panel, then the System applet. Click on the second tab (Device Manager) and "open" the icon for the drive. On the property sheet that appears, select the tab marked "Settings." At the bottom of that page, you'll see some boxes that let you select the letter for a removable-media drive. I usually pick R: for a CD-ROM, Z: for a Zip drive, J for a Jaz drive, etc. -- but you can set any letters you want.

Unfortunately, when you add a new hard drive with non-removable media to a system, this selection mechanism is turned off. So, you'll need to resort to partitioning tricks to keep your drive letters stable if you add a second drive to an existing system. The secret: create only an extended partition -- not a primary one -- on the new drive. This will keep the new drive from becoming D:; instead, its partitions will fall in neatly after all of the ones on the first physical drive.

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