Disclaimer — If this is being posted in the wrong category or class let the moderator feel free to re-move it. This is very likely an OCD sort of thing but then, why does a man climb a mountain?
Once upon a time, I was able to manipulate the order of my drives as they were presented in Windows Disk Management. This means that from the top on down the first entry would be disk “A”, the second would be disk “B” and the third would be disk “C”. I managed to secure and hold this order over 20 drives in my Work Station with X, Y, and Z ports reserved for USB connectivity etc.
I am posting this here because I am using LSI/Broadcom HBA cards in my PC. Originally I was only using one but now I’m using two of these cards, one in IR mode and the other in IT mode. Repairing this order was easy when I was only using one card as it always took priority on the list and since it was configured for RAID 10 on both ports these arrays became “drives A and B”. This was followed by the main OS drive, C.
Well, since I added a second HBA card all that changed and now my drive order is a mess and I was wondering if there was any way at all that I could get that A,B,C order back where drive “C” is the drive where I keep my Windows OS and it appears in Windows Disk Management in the correct listed order. The challenge here is that I do not want to run the OS on the HBA card.
I realize that with respect to functionality this is immaterial, but I am wondering peradventure there may be more “OCD” people like me out there who have this Windows Disk Management thing mastered. I like things to look nice and orderly.
Hey, can’t change the order, but there are two orders, as you probably know.
One can actively give a partition, a “drive letter” like b:\
But the list has the disk number on the left in the disk management screen
I don’t know if there is a way to re-organise that list, as I presumed it polled the providers, the same way a system polls & enumerates PCI devices. As in, it might change later?
But I don’t admin Windows, just a user.
I presume there is a way to manually assign a value to a drive in the registry, but not sure it would remain static per drive cage/SAS connector
Especially if a drive is missing, it would not reserve that number, I think it would bump all other drives down one to fill the missing number?
Yeah, that’s kinda/sorta the problem. If I pull a drive Disk Mangement will re-assign the missing drive letter to a different drive on reboot; but that’s not really the thing I’m niggling about so much as I want the list to keep the same drive placement. For example, I want the third drive listed in windows Disk Management to be the drive with the Windows OS and for it to remain that way. If I can get the same drives to keep the same order on reboot I can then manually change each drive letter to the correct order in sequence. I have done this before, but only with one HBA card. Introducing a second card means that the two cards are both given priority in Disk Management and this pushes the “C” drive way on down south. So, yes. I want Disk #3 (far left hand margin) to be drive “C”, list that way and remain that way regardless of how many other drives I add.
Many moons ago (Win XP, so I am not sure of this is still the case with 10/11) you could go into BIOS and reorder the boot order of your drives. Windows picks that BIOS order up for the Disk Management.
