Some senseless babbling from Jonathan De Boyne Pollard to Mike Ruskai
on 11-20-99  13:17 about fdisk /query...

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

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

I'd be inclined to go with physical definition order.  But my primary
concern when writing the above was to criticize the practice of assigning
letters to primary partitions on separate physical drives before assigning
letters to any logical drives in extended partitions.

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

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

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

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

Well, the only reasonable alternative (and I like your concept above) is to
follow a set of rules in the absence of the directive, which would also
fill in the blanks (going through unassigned letters in alphabetical order,
and assigning all drives not already given a letter).

It'd be confusing only to those daring to use it, otherwise functioning as
expected by the uninitiated.

Mike Ruskai
thannymeister@yahoo.com


... From now on I'm feeding the cat food that matches the carpet color.

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