Windows 8 Windows and Drive Letters

[Rataplan]

Greetings:

Now, for some reasons I had to reinstall Win 8 Pro 9200, but my drive letters got AGAIN screwed up.
Annoyingly, I had to set them all back again, and having 20 partitions, it is a disaster.
If I am, God forbids, to reinstall my W8 once more, is there a way to KEEP the partitions as I have set them now?
Or will I AGAIN have them completely in disorder, as per my second installation?

Is there a way to keep them as is now?

5X Seagate 3TB (GTP), each with multiple partitions, varying from drive to drive.

Thank you aforehand:
Luke

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

Other then the Windows drive staying C: I don't know of any way to tell them which is which during installation.

I only have 2 drives with 4 partitions plus my 2 DVD drives, so it's not that big an issue for me but I did have to change the drive letters to get the DVD drive at the bottom of the list instead of inserting them as D: and E:.

As far as I've seen it letters partitions on a drive sequentially, i.e. it doesn't skip around when it names them but I don't know that for sure.

It sound to me like you need to make a backup of your OS partition so you don't have to re-install Windows when something goes bad.

If you make a drive image of just the C:\ partition it will restore it just the way it was and leave everything else alone.
This is especially easy if you make the C:\ partition small and install only the basic software and put your program installs on another partition.

Drive names aren't burned in stone with Windows.

If you've ever set up your computer to dual boot you will see that the drive letters are different when you move from on install to the other.

The drive you boot into always seems to stay drive C: which requires changing the old drive C: to something else.

Mike

 

[Joe S]

I don't know if this will help, but Windows 7 and Vista had signature collision problems when physically identical drives were connected. Do a search there was a method to make the drive ID unique to fix this.
Joe