Windows 10 - Order of Allocation of Drives

ISTR the card had a set of 8x headers for activity LEDs, any point in wiring it up then doing a huge read?

I have never explored the options in Win10, but I remember in Win7 I went into "Computer Management" then "Disc Management" and I got a display of all the disc drives. I could then right click and use the "Change Drive Letter" option to give specific drives my chosen drive letter.

I would expect Win10 to have a similar capability but MS might have moved it somewhere else or given it a different name. I heard a rumour that MS had two development streams and they leapfrogged each other, hence a good one followed by a not so good one before you got another good one. So Win98 developed into Vista which developed into Win8, and XP developed into Win7 which developed into Win10. That is why I am reasonably confident that what was available in Win7 would have carried into Win10. The problem will be finding where it has been put.

Happy hunting ...

Same - via Disk Management

Hi IJJ, nice to hear from you :-)

I have indeed found that option, the issue I have is relating the physical drive to the drive's location. It's a Silverstone C380 case with 8 hot swap drives accessible from the front.

The drive letters, are maintained in the registry of each boot OS.

This means, without some fairly careful "manual matching" on the part of the user, some multiboots will not display the same letters.

for example, as a joke, one boot OS here has three partitions labeled CHS. If I boot the other OS, the letters are CDE and the C obviously can't be the same on both OSes when they boot. There are limitations on what the boot letter can be. You can "contrive" to make the drive letter other than C, I've done that before, but this is something you have to set your snare, before the OS installation phase begins.

The result is, the boot OS letters will be irregular, while the data partitions, the letters can be assigned manually.

The command "mountvol" displays a similarly named section of the Registry. That observation doesn't have a lot of utility exactly.

The OS collects info and shares it in Powershell (without Admin being needed). However, again, as in most things, the numbers don't make a lot of sense. You start to see a pattern and say to youself "we're saved", then the very next hardware device type comes along and spoils the pattern.

In this example, I put four storage devices in a PC. The PCH SATA has the SSD boot drive. Two Asmedia cards (two ports each) were put in x1 slots, and each card supports one HDD. But the HDD was put on a different port of the two ports offered on the card. The fourth storage device is an NVMe, that would not work on the CPU sled location, but worked OK on the PCH hosted sled. The two Asmedia cards make a tiny bit of sense in their numbering, but the NVMe then pokes its nose in and ruins the pattern.

PS > Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_DiskDrive -Property *

DeviceID : \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 Caption : Lexar SSD NS100 256GB <=== PCH SATA port SCSIBus : 3 SCSILogicalUnit : 0 SCSIPort : 0 SCSITargetId : 0

DeviceID : \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE2 SCaption : WDC WD2003FZEX-00SRLA0 <=== Each HDD has its own ASMEDIA card, but one has low port, one has high port SCSIBus : 0 SCSILogicalUnit : 0 SCSIPort : 2 SCSITargetId : 0

DeviceID : \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE3 Caption : Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 500GB <=== NVMe is on Southbridge bus side, with the two ASMEDIA cards. SCSIBus : 0 SCSILogicalUnit : 0 SCSIPort : 3 SCSITargetId : 0

DeviceID : \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1 Caption : WDC WD1003FZEX-00K3CA0 <=== Each HDD has its own ASMEDIA card, but one has low port, one has high port SCSIBus : 1 SCSILogicalUnit : 0 SCSIPort : 1 SCSITargetId : 0

PS C:\Users\Bullwinkle> ROWBOAT <=== Name of Win10 boot OS for this test (NS100 #4)

It took a few tries, before I could even get the hardware to behave, let alone work well.

Notice there are no drive letters. Not at this level. This is just the "rows" in Disk Management level.

On your eight port card, it's possible the "SCSIPORT" field may increment. But if you have an NVMe sled on the same side as the eight port card, it is also possible its SCSIPORT will be a continuation of the enumeration on the eight port card.

What's supposed to inspire you, is seeing the Port numbers displayed in the UEFI popup boot menu :-)

When you have a 6 port SATA motherboard, that is not usually a single hardware block. It is a block of 2 ports, plus a block of 4 ports, from the era where two ports were SATA III and the other four ports were SATA II.

Back in the day, Win98 had PrimaryMaster, PrimarySlave, SecondaryMaster, SecondarySlave, on INT14 and INT15. Thus, they tried to keep that as a "group of four" detection as a hardware block, it had Compatible and Native modes and so on. It was done that way, so Win98 (for a time), could boot on your equipment. When you operated that way, the other two SATA ports might have been shut off (so Win98 would not get confused). That's why the division of the ports is the way it is.

Today, the ports could be uniform and they could be put on the same hardware bock, because a set of BIOS options no longer exists.

Things are discovered in a kind of "bus enumeration order", and it is supposed to make sense. Scouts honour. Or the cheque is in the mail. Something like that. Maybe AIDA64 lists them properly.

Paul

Sigh. SO much simpler in Linux

Thank you for the work you put in, I read it but snipped for brevity.

It describes very well the nightmare I am in, however I connect the LSI card to the backplane I can't get the drives to follow on logically - which I need if I am to be able to replace the right failed drive. Part 2 of the nightmare is drilling holes in the drive, hitting it with a lump hammer then getting a passing steam roller to drive over it before discovering I extracted the wrong drive.

It wasn't helped by my Mattias keyboard packing up, unknown to me various keys have just stopped working which I didn't discover until I tried to copy and paste a s/w key and just managed to deleted it!

I'll have an ice lolly and thing it through...

Keyboards work on a matrix of wires, like "7x17".

You may find that rather than all the keys taking a holiday, it is just a group of 7 of them.

The "modifier" keys are separate electrical inputs and those don't have to be part of a matrix wiring pattern.

Due to the irregular nature of the key layout, the "wire" with the group of 7, the pattern of how they're wired, may not be apparent. The failed ones could all be in one general locality, but you can't always stick a rule along the keys and predict which other one will also be failed.

The matrix "scans" looking for key closures. Spilling juice or a Coke in there, the scanning matrix is high impedance, which means it does not take much of a conductive fluid to annoy the thing.

Paul