Hi, Mr. Curious.
I found disc management and lo and behold there was my hidden disc.
My favorite utility - ever since it first appeared in Windows 2000, 10 years
ago this month. ;<)
There are several ways to run Disk Management. My favorite is just to press
Start, type "diskmgmt.msc", and press Enter. (You'll need to furnish
Administrator credentials, of course, because you can do a lot of harm here,
as well as good.) Then Maximize the window so that you're not working
through a keyhole, and widen the Status column so you can see all the very
important labels, such as which are the System and Boot volumes.
It wasn't really hidden but it had no drive letter assigned. So, the
computer gave it one.
The computer usually doesn't pay much attention to drive letters. These are
mostly for use by us humans. When installed on a virgin system, Win7
creates a small 100 MB partition with no drive letter so that there is less
chance for a user to delete or corrupt essential files. But Disk Management
will assign it a letter, if you insist. The letters A: and B: have
traditionally been reserved for floppy drives since the days before there
were hard drives, but they can also be used. I find it helpful to assign
letters mnemonically and often use W: for my DVD Writer drive, or X: for a
WinXP installation partition. Or even J:\Windows for Win7's Boot Folder.
(See KB 314470 for definitions of System Volume and Boot Volume - but be
aware that the KB needs to be updated and clarified, even though it was last
revised 10/29/09:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470/EN-US )
But seriously, Win7 doesn't automatically assign drive letters to fixed
disk? Did I have to "map" it first?
A "drive" letter is NEVER assigned to a fixed disk. Even if a single
partition covers the whole disk, the letter is assigned to the partition,
not the HDD. So if no partition has been created, no letter can be
assigned. The partition need not be formatted, but it must exist.
The Win7 Operating system is now on drive letter "J". I don't know why a
personal computer (not a networked one) could ever have a drive letter
"J", but I got one.
Every one of the 26 letters in the English alphabet can be used for "drive"
letters. I put "drive" in quotes because letters don't actually refer to
physical hard drives, of course, but to partitions on the disks - or on
flash drives or optical drives or digital cameras or SD cards (or on network
drives, but I have no experience with networks) or ...??? (Yes, flash
drives, CDs, etc., can be partitioned, although they rarely are.) The term
"volume" is often used, instead of "drive", to cut down on the confusion a
little. Disk Management can assign or reassign these letters EXCEPT for the
System and Boot volumes; these letters are assigned by Setup.exe during
installation of the operating system and can't be reassigned except by
re-installing Windows. (Unless you're more expert than me at hacking the
Registry.)
When installed by booting from the DVD, Win7 assigns the letter C: to its
own Boot Volume, even if we install it to the 3rd partition on the second
HDD, because it has no idea what letters have been assigned already. But if
we boot into WinXP, for example, and run Win7's Setup from that desktop,
Setup can see the letters that WinXP has assigned and will use those same
letters. So if you had already created Drive J: and told Setup to install
Win7 into that volume, it would obey your instruction and you would end up
with Win7 in J:\Windows. To change that, you'd have to install Win7 again.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64
