That's the other option that I've seen- in the disk management utility, you can change that sort order. Because I had an old drive with windows, and then installed another drive and set that to C, that drive was in the wrong order. I was able to fix it in the disk management utility.
That works fine when you have two physical disks.
In this case, there are six partitions on a single 2tb drive. You can re-letter, rename, re-size, whatever you think will work but the drive sort in File Explorer still remains the same.
I re-lettered all partitions, with the exception of C:, starting in the middle of the alphabet.
File Explorer then showed what was drive D: , as Drive J: , C: comes up in the second position, Drive K: displays where Drive F: showed below C: and so on. Drive E: has a new letter but it still winds up at the bottom of the list of six partitions.
I returned the letters to C: through H: as they are displayed in Disk Management, return to File Explorer and the order returns to D: , C: , F: , G: , H: ,and E: .
I told Shades yesterday that I remembered adding some old memory to that machine a couple of years ago and after it sat here for a couple of hours with the Win10 install running it developed some weird HDD activity and emitted some strange sounds. Last night I pulled those two old memory sticks and then did a clean install of the Win10 preview, for the 4th or 5th time.
When I booted for the install it was immediately apparent that one of those memory sticks was bad, or failed after warming up and the install proceeded post haste!
Welcome screen, logon, and File Explorer........ the drive order still remains at D,C,F,G,H,E.
The log file of the install has dropped from 3700kb to 149kb and shows nothing that would change the drive order.
Conclusion: The problem is in the ISO download! If I decide to continue playing with it, I'll download a 64bit version since that machine will support 64bit Windows.
Thanks for the suggestion. Sorry it's not the right answer.
I installed Win10 on that old machine strictly to play with. I have no intention of upgrading from Win8.1.1, which I thoroughly enjoy.