Physical Hard Drive Number Assignment.

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Hello, I have three physical hard drives inside my computer. They are all SATA. Today I added an eSATA drive and I noticed that this has taken over the drive 1 spot. I would have thought it would turn up as physical drive 3 (system c: is on drive 0). When I don’t have it switched on the drive numbers are reassigned. Is there anyway to dictate which physical disk number is assigned. For peace of mind I’d prefer the eSATA drive to always be drive 3.

Thanks,

Chris

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This is determined by the order in which Windows “sees” the hard disk controller and attached drives.
The easiest way to have this disk appear as the last disk may be to connect it to the last SATA connector on your computer.

cheers, Paul

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The easiest way to have this disk appear as the last disk may be to connect it to the last SATA connector on your computer.

Thanks, Paul.This appears to be the case. According to what I read online the physical disk order shouldn’t make a difference and indeed I was able to use an Acronis backup to restore my system even though the partitions I was restoring had moved. However, since I’ve just had a massive hard drive failure with a 1 TB drive less than a year old now reporting that it is only 33 mb in size I’m very concerned about physical disk number consignment. It may just be a coincidence that the drive failed after it’s physical disk number was shunted but in future I will definitely pay more attention to the layout of the sata connectors on the motherboard and the physical disk number.

Chris

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I googled Fix Drive Letter and this is what came up.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/change_drive_letters.htm

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I googled Fix Drive Letter and this is what came up.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/change_drive_letters.htm

Thanks for the link That explains about how to change a drive letter which I am familiar with. The drive letter, C: D: etc is different from the physical drive number. It was that which changed.

Chris

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