Message-Id:	<200108171054.f7HAspR22908@if.pwr.wroc.pl>
From:	"Michal H. Tyc" <mhtyc AT if DOT pwr DOT wroc DOT pl>
Organization:	Institute of Physics, Wroclaw University of Technology
Date:	Fri, 17 Aug 2001 12:58:47 +0200
X-Mailer:	Arachne V1.70;rev.3
To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Drive letters assignment under various DOSes
MIME-Version:	1.0
Reply-To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com

Good morning/afternoon/evening, all DOS experts!

It's known that the way that DOS assigns drive letters to hard disk
partitions at startup doesn't work well in case of adding or removing
a second hard disk.  A change of drive letters occurs then and leads to
invalid paths, etc.  Also the way that multiple primary partitions on
a single disk are handled is incompatible between various DOSes.

I wrote a small utility that can automatically arrange drive letters
at startup time, according to their physical hard disk number
(the number used by BIOS INT 13h).  This way all the partitions
(primary and extended) on the second HD have letters AFTER ones
on the first HD and your software installed on the first HD is not
affected by any changes of paths (too bad that's not the default
behaviour in DOS...)
In addition, this utility can swap (exchange) explicitly given
drive letters.

DRVSWAP is available (with source) for download at 
http://www.if.pwr.wroc.pl/~mhtyc/software/
Please refer to drvswap.txt (in drvswap.zip) for more details.

This is EXPERIMENTAL software after LIMITED NUMBER of test, 
so please use it carefully (and AT YOUR OWN RISK).
It is indented mainly for testing by "DOS experts".

All your opinions, comments and corrections are welcome.
I wonder if it can work under FreeDOS...

Greetings,
Michal

P.S.  This message was sent to both FreeDOS and OpenDOS lists.
      Sorry if you received it twice.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michal H. Tyc <mhtyc AT if DOT pwr DOT wroc DOT pl>
Ph.D. student at Institute of Physics, Wroclaw University of Technology,
                 Wybrzeze Wyspianskiego 27, 50-370 Wroclaw, Poland
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