MR>> I'd be inclined to go with physical definition order.  

 JDBP>> You mean to simply enumerate all volumes on a single drive before
 JDBP>> proceeding to the next one ?

 MR> Yes.

This does have some merits.

 MR>> But my primary concern when writing the above was to criticize the 
 MR>> practice of assigning letters to primary partitions on separate 
 MR>> physical drives before assigning letters to any logical drives in 
 MR>> extended partitions.

 JDBP>> One can understand why it is this way, of course.  Choosing to
 JDBP>> enumerate all primary partitions first made MS-DOS 3.3 backwards
 JDBP>> compatible with MS-DOS 3.2 . 

 MR> Backwards compatible?  3.3 is when the extended partition came into
 MR> being, right?  If so, then backwards compatibility isn't the issue,
 MR> since that was broken by adding the extended partition.

The backwards compatibility was that on a system including an extended
partition one could boot either MS-DOS 3.2 or MS-DOS 3.3 and both would assign 
the same drive letters to the primary partitions.  In other words, adding an
extended partition to a disc didn't cause MS-DOS 3.3 to use different drive
letter assignments to the ones that MS-DOS 3.2 would use on the same disc,
even if the extended partition happened to be added in between two primary
partitions.

Put more simply: Microsoft, and the OEMs, didn't receive large numbers of
support calls from people who had added extended partitions to their hard
discs and discovered that they didn't see the same drive letters in MS-DOS 3.3 
as in MS-DOS 3.2.

 ¯ JdeBP ®

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