Setting Drive Letters in Windows 95/98

Have you ever added a new drive to your system and been dismayed to find that it didn't show up as the drive letter you expected -- or worse, changed the drive assignments of other drives in your system? Here's how to fix it. In this example, we're assuming you've added an LS-120 SuperDisk drive to your system. If your drive isn't a floppy drive as this one is, skip step one.

1. Make sure your BIOS is not expecting a drive to use the motherboard's existing standard floppy disk drive controller - this will definitely interfere with your SuperDisk's need to grab that drive letter. The settings you need to change may manifest in two places: Standard CMOS settings and, on my motherboard, there's an entry labeled "PNP, PCI and ONBOARD I/O" that also needs to have the ONBOARD FDD CONTROLLER option disabled.
   Then, In your CMOS settings (BIOS), there's a place to "Force update ESCD." (In my system, it's in "PNP, PCI and ONBOARD I/O" again.) This stands for extended system configuration data. Set this to Enable. (It will automatically reset itself to "Disabled" the next time you reboot, as you don't need or want to reset this data every time.
   Reboot, check status. If that does the trick (it probably will), great. If not....
2. Set IDE devices (particularly the one with the SuperDisk on it, which I assume is "Secondary Slave.") in Standard CMOS Setup to "AUTO."
   Reboot, check status. If that does the trick, great. If not....
3. In Windows Device Manager, specify drive letters for your drives, using the procedure outlined here:
   Start>Settings>Control Panel>System>Device Manager
   Expand "Disk Drives."
   Click on e.g., SuperDisk Drive.
   Click "Properties" at the bottom of the window.
   Under "Reserved Drive Letters" select drive letter A: (if possible; sometimes it's not) for the SuperDisk drive. The next time you launch Windows with your SuperDisk in there, the SuperDisk will be drive "A."
   Repeat procedure as necessary for additional drives.
4. If none of these steps work (I'm pretty sure they will, though!), obtain a BIOS update for your motherboard and repeat steps 2 and 3.

Good luck!

For Further Reading

• Assigning Drive Letters and DMA settings in Win95/98