Adding HD which has a primary partition

[MartinS]

WinNT 4 SP5.

I currently have 2 hard drives.

Drive 1 has primary and 3 additional logical partitions

Drive 2 has a primary partition only (my old drive which I left in case I needed to get back to my old Win98 config).

The drive letters are currently
C: - Drive 1
D: - Drive 2
E,F,G Drive 1.

I now need to access data on another drive which already has a primary and another partition. If I just plug it in then the primary partition will cause the drive letters to shiffle up (primary partitions always appear first - hence C and D at the moment) which will probably upset everything

I have partition Magic 4, but I'd need to boot into NT first to run it - wouldn't I - Any DOS support in PM4 ?.

Question is can I get rid of the primary partition (I don't need to boot from this ever again) without loosing the data. I'm no whizz with FDISK and really don't want to destroy the data on this other drive.

I really want it to appear as

C: - Drive 1 }
D: - Drive 2 } Same as now.
E,F,G - Drive 1. }

H,I - other drive I want to add.

I've sensibly renamed my CD and CDRW to R: and W: to keep them out of the way.

[HollyBerri]

Martin, yes, PM4 has a DOS executable...it always has. If I was home, I'd boot up my cd and tell you the name of it, but I'm not... I do know that if you did a custom install, you had the option not to install it--- I don't know if it is part of the typical install.

In all other versions it's been right in the PM folder.. if the Windows .exe is named "PQmagic.exe" look for the .exe with a similar name but with some indication that it's a DOS or text program... that's what I remember about the naming scheme of previous versions.

But if you're only going to do this once, why is the temporary re-shuffle a problem (I know it's annoying)?

I think IceStorm is right... unplug both your current drives, plug in the new drive, boot from it, save the data onto a CD-R and then pull the 3rd drive out again.

It's really not worth futzing around with it all that much, if you're not going to be using the drive on a long-term basis.

just my 0.02

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Holly

[birdy]

I once managed to get a hard drive to appear after the cr roms. It happened by accident as i hadn't enabled the channel for the drive in the bios. The drive still worked but it came up as the last letter on the computer rather than the second as it normally would. You could try this.

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[The PIT]

I thought under NT you can specify the drive letters. I can't check this at the moment since I'm 98 downloading a large file but I'll let you know.