What partitions what? I think windows is lying to me :(

[Waldo2k2]

Ok heres the deal. I set up this computer a few months ago with 2 hdd's in it. I'm damn near positive I put partitions c and d on the big drive which is the master on the primary ide, and that e was the small hard drive as master on the second channel. The problem is, windows says that the d partition is actually on the small drive and e is on the big one. I've also had conflicting things occur when a drive is removed on boot. For instance, If d was on the secondary drive, then how would ntldr even load to say there was a hard disk failure? (meaning the small one couldn't be found)??? So, hardware common sense says c and d are on one drive...windows says not. Is there some third party tool I can use that I can trust to tell me the real story? It only matters cause im installing linux this weekend, and I need to know if it's going to be on a seperate drive or if it's going to be on one with partitions on ti already. Thanks for any help you can give.

[pyrotherm]

my comp has recently done this to me too, all that is happening is that windows is renaming your drives, no idea why but is a windows glitch

[TravisS]

Well, you don't say what OS you use but I'm going to assume XP :)

Go to control panel, administrative tools, then computer managment. Now, in the left panel go to disk managment. You'll now see each of your drives as well as the partitions that can be found on them :)

[Waldo2k2]

Well i used an ntfs reader and DOS to check it out. I guess when i installed xp the setup program is the one that messed up what part's went where. So D was on the second drive. Now my second prob. I want to move D to the unpartitioned space that was E (i did some deleting last night). I could use partition magic, but, would windows freak after the move? Would anything work? D is the boot drive, how can i set it to D on the other hard drive if i move it?? thanks all, this partition moving crap is new to me.

[PostCode]

All logical drives are assigned a drive letter before any extended partitions are. Therefore, the second logical partition, in this case the small drive, is assigned the second drive letter. After logical drives have been assigned drive letters, then extended partitions are assigned drive letters, starting with any extended partitions on the first logical drive and moving down the chain until all extended partitions have been assigned drive letters for all drives in the system.

Along with what Travis said, within the Disk Management tool you can reassign drives drive letters. Simply right click on the given drive and choose "Change Drive Letter and Path.."

[Waldo2k2]

All logical drives are assigned a drive letter before any extended partitions are. Therefore, the second logical partition, in this case the small drive, is assigned the second drive letter. After logical drives have been assigned drive letters, then extended partitions are assigned drive letters, starting with any extended partitions on the first logical drive and moving down the chain until all extended partitions have been assigned drive letters for all drives in the system.

thanks! that's exactly what i needed to know, it all makes sense now. Anyway, i couldn't rename them because D is the boot partition and you can't do it, and C is the sys partition so it won't let you rename that either.