Message-Id: <200108171054.f7HAspR22908@if.pwr.wroc.pl> From: "Michal H. Tyc" 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 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2 Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit 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 Ph.D. student at Institute of Physics, Wroclaw University of Technology, Wybrzeze Wyspianskiego 27, 50-370 Wroclaw, Poland ------------------------------------------------------------------------