How to know the Physical Hard Drive Number
The physical hard drive number is a very important thing and should be written exact. The illegal drive specification may cause a major data loss. We must be confident about the drive number during the data recovery or disk troubleshooting programming. How to know the drive number of any disk with different arrangements of disks can be estimated by the examples given next.
According to a most generalized Myth, The physical drive numbers are provided according to the attachment status of the disk however in some or special cases it may be dependent for your Operating system’s Boot procedure or boot settings.
The most generalized idea for the Physical drive number provided by BIOS has been given here but even then you must confirm with the help of any disk editing tool or with the programs given in the next chapters, about the configuration of the disk. After being sure you should take any decision about running such programs which may corrupt or harm the data, if used illegally or in lack of knowledge.
Generally, If the two disks are attached to the system, one is primary master and another is secondary master, the first preference will be given to the primary master (and then to primary slave if available) and then to secondary master (and then to secondary slave if available and so on) and the physical number will be given according to their preferences.
Let us assume that your system supports the maximum four hard disks at a time. The all four hard disks may be connected as given Next:
Primary Master |
Primary Slave |
Secondary Master |
Secondary Slave |
Now let us consider some cases for drive number of physical drives. Here I assume that you have connected the disks with proper jumper settings as mentioned by the disk manufacturer, and in proper Master–Slave settings:
- If all four Hard Disks are connected to the system: if all four disks are connected to the system the physical drive numbers will be as follows:
Primary/Secondary (Master/Slave) |
Status |
Physical Drive Number and Description |
Primary Master |
Disk is Present |
Physical Drive Number will be 80H. In this case the Hard Disk is called the First Hard Disk. |
Primary Slave |
Disk is Present |
Physical Drive Number will be 81H. In this case the Hard Disk is called the Second Hard Disk. |
Secondary Master |
Disk is Present |
Physical Drive Number will be 82H. In this case the Hard Disk is called the Third Hard Disk. |
Secondary Slave |
Disk is Present |
Physical Drive Number will be 83H. In this case the Hard Disk is called the Fourth Hard Disk. |
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