DBAN Works Great, But It Changes Drive Letters

[Anonymous]

The title says it all. I had no problem using DBAN, however, the software did change my drive letters. Before using DBAN one HDD was labeled "C" and the second was labeled "D". Now my "C" drive is labeled "F" and my "D" drive is labeled "C".

A little confusing? It took me a few days to get used to the change. How can prevent DBAN from renaming the drives?
It wiped my 60GB HDD in 9 hours 45 minutes. I couldn't stay to watch. Maybe the software gave me the option to save my former drive labels while I wasn't looking.

Despite that problem, I like your product. It does the job and does it well.

Thanx.

 

[dajhorn]

This happened because the Microsoft Windows installer put the operating system in an extended partition. You can avoid this behavior by recreating a filesystem in a primary partition on the primary disk prior to running the installer.

IIRC, the default assignment order is:

Disk 1, P1 P2 P3 P4
Disk 2, P1 P2 P3 P4
...
Disk n, P1 P2 P3 P4
ATAPI Devices
Disk 1, P5 P6 P7 P8
Disk 2, P5 P6 P7 P8
...
Disk n, P5 P6 P7 P8

I'll guess that your assignment is:

Disk 2, Primary Partition 1 -> C:
CD-ROM -> D:
Zip Drive (or somesuch) -> E:
Disk 1, Extended Partition 5 -> F:

If you ran DBAN against only your %SYSTEMDRIVE% partition, then the labels on the other drive letters will be intact.

 

[freeplay]

I had the same problem.

Before DBAN:
C: - Hard Drive (single partition)
D:, E: - DVD/CD Drives
F:, G:, H:, I: - Media Card Reader Drives

After DBAN:
C:, D:, E:, & F: - Media Card Reader Drives
G:, H: - DVD/CD Drives
I: - Only available drive letter for hard drive

In hindsight, I should have realized that all partitions on the hard drive would be deleted. However, I'm not technical enough to understand how the WinXP installer detects and assigns drive letters. The only solution I found was to install XP (Home Ed. SP1) on the I: drive as it was insistent on doing, and then change the drive letters using the following procedures:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q223188/

I then had to re-install Windows, doing a high-level NTFS format along the way, since changing the system boot drive letter the way I did can cause problems (I also got a few non-fatal errors installing to I: because the installer was trying to copy some files to the C: drive). Although this solution worked fine for me, I was wondering if there is a more elegant solution? I guess my question is actually two-fold:

1) Is there a way to run DBAN without destroying the partition assignments (and if so, does this still adequately "clean" your drive)?

2) If you do run DBAN the way I did (just typed 'quick' at the command prompt to do a quick erase), is there a way to adjust the drive letters without having to install Windows?

Thanks for any help. Other than this minor problem, DBAN worked great!

 

[dajhorn]

1) Is there a way to run DBAN without destroying the partition assignments (and if so, does this still adequately "clean" your drive)?

Yes, if you run DBAN interactively, then you can select each partition individually, which will keep the partition table intact.

This does not wipe slack space, but the operating system should not have been using unallocated space.

2) If you do run DBAN the way I did (just typed 'quick' at the command prompt to do a quick erase), is there a way to adjust the drive letters without having to install Windows?

No, not with DBAN.

Drive letters are a fiction of the Microsoft Windows registry. They don't exist until Microsoft Windows is installed.