What i found that root of all of the problems you might encounter is that your drive letters may or may not change. The first thing that can be affected is your operating system, OS/2. If you look at your CONFIG.SYS, you will notice most of the entries have a drive letter reference. If that drive letter changes, the entry in the CONFIG.SYS is no longer correct. But even if you did a search and replace on your CONFIG.SYS to update the drive letters, that would not be enough. The OS/2 desktop stores references to drive letters too, the most important of which is the location of your desktop! This type of reference is not designed to be changed by you.
The next type of things to be affected are your applications and their configuration files. Many programs record information, such as the location of your data files, in one place or another. Some use a text based configuration file, while others use more efficient binary files. The former can be edited with a text editor, but the later require some third party utility. OS/2 falls into this second category - the .INI files store information about your desktop. The real issue is that you generally have no idea where and how many places need to be updated!
Finally, there are applications that allow you to configure various paths and directories. For example, a word processor might allow you to select a default "Save As" directory. This type of change is best, because it is completely under your control, a nd somewhat obvious.
So why all the fuss?
To understand why these issues are a concern, we have to understand how drive letters are assigned. But before we can do that, we must get some terminology out of the way. There is a distinction between drive and partition. A drive refers to a physical hard drive in your computer. A partition is a section of a hard drive. Drive letters are assigned to partitions.
When your computer first starts, it looks to the first physical hard drive. It looks for a particular type of partition called a primary partition. A hard drive may have more than one primary partition, but only one of them is active at a time. If the computer finds a primary partition on the first drive, it assigns it drive letter C:. It then looks for a second hard drive. If one is present, and there is a primary partition on it, it assigns it the next drive letter, D:.
Once all of the active primary partitions have been assigned drive letters, the rest of the partitions are assigned letters in a similar fashion. The first hard drive is searched for any additional partitions. If some are found, the first is assigned the next sequential drive letter (in this case, E
; the second gets the next drive letter (F
; and so on. Then the second hard drive is searched and its partitions are assigned drive letters.
So what does this mean if you want to add another hard drive? If you have only one hard drive and only one partition, you're in good shape. Your new (second) hard drive will become D, or D, E, etc. if you partition it.
However, if your current drive has more than one partition, then by adding a new primary partition (on the second drive), you will be changing your drive letters. The good news here is that a hard drive does not have to have a primary partition in use. If you create the partition(s) on your new hard drive as extended logical (not primary) partitions, then they will fall after all your currently existing drive letters.
The worst case is that you already have two hard drives, one of which needs to be replaced. This process can be lengthy and complicated. The problem stems from the fact that most IDE controllers only support two hard drives. So, you are forced to replace one of the hard drives. To preserve the data off of the drive being removed, first back it up either with a tape back-up or onto floppy disks. Then you may replace the drive and restore the back-up. To make this transition easier, consider partitioning the new drive in the same way as the old drive, except use larger partitions. This will allow all of your drive letters to remain the same, and hopefully your applications will never know the difference.
As an alternative, consider purchasing an IDE controller that can handle four hard drives, or even better a SCSI controller and hard drive. You will still have to face many of the issues discussed here, but you will have additional flexibility because you can add the new hard drive without replacing one of your existing hard drives.
