MR> Now, if we could kill the convention of assigning letters to primary
 MR> partitions first, things could be a lot easier.

What mechanism *would* you have to assign drive letters, then ?

Windows NT does it by having a table stored in its registry, which maps drive
letters to partitions.  But I would object to this sort of solution, simply
because the registry is not in an easily accessible format should one want to
repair or alter this table (when booted from a recovery boot floppy, for
example).

Personally, I would lean towards a CONFIG.SYS directive:

        DRIVELETTERS=C:0,1;D:0,2;E:0,3;F:1,1;G:1,2;H:1,3

But that raises the thorny questions of what to do when not all partitions are 
covered by the information given in the directive, and what to do when the
directive is missing altogether.

 ¯ JdeBP ®

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