Changing Drive Numbers after HD Install

MylesS · 22 Jul 2018 at 08:48

I've added a 3TB drive to my system that's running Windows 10.

It previously had a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HDD

After adding the new drive and rebooting the machine, the new drive was recognised as Disk 0, and my SSD which was previously Disk 0 was re-numbered as Disk1 - as in pic below -

I had already re-assigned drive letters to my installed drives, so that the new drive could be assigned Drive D

I didn't want the new drive recognised as Disk 0 however, so I connected the SATA cable for that drive to a different port, rebooted, and this time the drive is recognised as Disk 2 - as in pic below, with my SSD reverting to Disk 0

Ideally I would like my new drive (letter D), to show as Disk 1 and my older drive (now letter E) to show as Disk 2

Is it just a matter of swapping over the data cables going to the drives? Or is it more involved than that?

I know that everything will work as it is, but it would be nice to have the drives in alphabetical order as well as numerical. Bearing in mind the 3TB drive needs to be drive D, so re-assigning the drive letters won't get me what I want.

Hope someone can advise.

MylesS · 22 Jul 2018 at 13:34

I'm now wondering though, if I swap cables, if Windows will show them as new drives that require formatting. I don't want to lose my data. Maybe I should leave it as it is.

MylesS · 22 Jul 2018 at 14:41

bremen1874 said:
Why do you care what number the drive is assigned? There's nothing to be gained by trying to get them numbered in a particular order.

I know, but I'm a bit OCD.

Lol. Never-mind, I'll learn to live with it.

MylesS · 23 Jul 2018 at 15:47

demonix said:
That won't happen since they were already set up in the OS and already initialised and formatted (even if you moved an initialised and formatted HDD to another system, it won't ask it again and just set everything up as normal).

Yes, thanks. I did some googling and saw that I would be ok, so gave swapping the cables a go this morning. It worked a treat, so now my drives are numbered in the order I'd like.

When making an image of my C drive using Macrium Reflect, I noticed that a 16MB unformatted partition had been created in the new drive. A bit sneaky of Microsoft as it didn't show that when formatting the drive using Disk Management. No one seems to know why Windows is now doing that, including Microsoft themselves! Anyway, I've deleted it, so now it just has one partition, like my E and F drives. I'm sure Microsoft are feverishly working on an update to cause mahem to my PC, but for now everything is looking good.

MylesS · 26 Jul 2018 at 13:40

Pocah said:
I would be very careful about this, some motherboards will take it in to their heads to install a boot manager, which is something you really don't want. This will appear a an additional small partition on the disk. And be advised that with the advent of M.2 sockets you often can't change the order of the SATA and M.2 !!

My motherboard is a MB-531-GI Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3P Intel Z170 (Socket 1151) DDR4 ATX

When I first installed the extra Drive, the order of the drive sequence changed, making my SSD 1 and my new drive 0. My SSD is now back to 0 which it should be, my new drive is 1 and the older HDD now 2.

My older HDD has only ever had one partition, so the extra HDD shouldn't need more than one either, as it's only ever going to be used for data. Everything is working well, so I think I should be ok.