Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Monday, 21 Dec 1992 11:36:15 CST
From: <U15708@uicvm.uic.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Can you solve this HD puzzle?

Hello,

I would appreciate some help with a hard drive problem on my system. Any
ideas, suggestions etc would be very welcome.

I have a 286, 1M RAM system with two Seagate 251 40 MB  drives. I want to
have two partitions on the first drive and one on the second, which would
give me drives C:, D: and E:. The thing is that I want C: and D: to be on the
first drive - the bootup drive, and E: to be on the second.

So I used fdisk to format the bootup drive with a primary and a secondary
partition ( I got C: and D: ) and then I formatted the second drive as one
primary partition and I now have E:. But when the system reboots, the letter
D: is automatically assigned to the second physical drive!

This is not what I want and the reasons are somewhat involved to go into
here, but just to give you an idea: the second physical drive does not always
work, so when it fails the system assigns the letter D: to the secondary
partition of the first physical drive and all the software on it is thrown
off because of the change of paths etc. What I want is to *always* have C:
and D: on the bootup drive and E: on the second, so that if the second
physical drive does not work, the software on D: won't be affected by a
logical drive name change.

A way around this is to format the second physical disk as a *secondary*
partition only, but skipping the first cylinder, so that the partition will
not include the space assigned for bootup information!  This way, the op
system (DR DOS 6.0 in my case) looks at the drives when it boots up but since
it does not find a formatted sector 0 (?) on the second physical drive it
does not automatically assign the next available logical letter, in this case
the letter D: (which I want to go to the extended partition of the first
physical drive).

So, everything worked ok until I started printing stuff... Somehow printing
was very slow. The printer would print a line, then there was some drive
activity and it would continue to the next line, print it, then stop again,
drive activity, etc. It would take 20 minutes to print a page and it would be
that way from any software I tried to print from, on any logical drive - I
don't remember if I tried printing simple text from the command line though.

In addition, I noticed a fair amount of system slowdown in performance,
especially in drive access on all logical drives. On the occasion that the
second physical drive wouldn't work, printing returned to normal speed and
the system came back to it's normal speed.

What do you think?  Is there any explanation of this slowdown?  Is it
avoidable?  Is there any other way I can have the desired logical drive names
mapped as I want: C: and D: on the first and E: on the second drive but
without these problems?

Thanks for your time and patience.

[:> Mario

                                            ______   ____   ______   ____
Mario   Kefalopoulos  u15708@uicvm.bitnet  |  __  | |  _ | |  __  | |  _ | |
pa vu ga di ke zo ni  u15708@uicvm.uic.edu | | _| | | |__| | | _| | | |__| |
                                           | |____| |______| |____| |______|
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware