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Oct 6, 2014 · I explain how to change drive letters and names, and why Paras’ situation may be confusing, but not serious. In the Windows world, drives can be identified by their names (such as...
- Partition
Step 3: Open Windows partitioning tool. Windows comes with a...
- Partition
Dec 18, 2015 · In this Microsoft article, it says: "You can assign the letters C through Z to each drive on your computer. A and B are usually reserved for floppy disk drives, but if your computer does not have floppy disk drives, you can assign A and B to volumes."
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If you’re a geek of a certain vintage—we won’t start naming years—the answer to this question is patently obvious to you. For younger geeks, however, the A: and B: drive have always been mysteriously unaccounted for on their computers.
SuperUser reader Linker3000 poses the question:
In Windows you have adrive. Everything labeled beyond that is with the following letter.
So your second drive is, your DVD isand if you put in a USB stick it becomesand the following drive. And so on and so forth.
But then, what and where areand?
What and where, indeed? Thankfully we have some seasoned geeks to answer the query.
Image by AJ Batac.
Veteran geek Adam Davis offers an in-depth look at the missing drive letters:
The early CP/M and IBM PC style computers had no hard drive. You had one floppy drive, and that was it. Unless you spent another $1k or so on a second floppy drive, then your system was smokin'! If you only had one drive it was common to boot from one disk, put in the other disk with your programs and data, then run the program. Once the program finished, the computer would request that you reinsert the boot disk so you could use the command line again. Copying data from one disk to the other was a series of "Please insert source disk into drive A:... Please insert destination disk into drive A:... Please insert source disk into drive A:..."
By the time hard drives became cheap, the "expensive" computers typically had two floppy drives (one to boot and run common programs, one to save data and run specific programs). And so it was common for the motherboard hardware to support two floppy drives at fixed system addresses. Since it was built into the hardware, it was thought that building the same requirement into the OS was acceptable, and any hard drives added to the machine would start with disk C: and so forth.
During the transition from 5.25" disks (which were actually, physically floppy) to 3.5" disks (which were encased in a harder plastic shell) it was common to have both drives in one system, and again it was supported on the motherboard with hardware, and in the OS at fixed addresses. As very few systems ran out of drive letters, it was not thought to be important to consider making those drives reassignable in the OS until much later when drives were abstracted along with addresses due to the plug'n'play standard.
A lot of software was developed since that time, and unfortunately much of it expected to see long-term storage on the C: drive. This includes the BIOS software that boots the computer. You can still attach two floppy drives, boot into DOS 6.1, and use it as you would have in the early 90's, with floppy drives A and B.
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Jul 19, 2019 · But files aren't saved directly to "this PC"; they are saved to a folder within a drive that is part of "This PC." By default, that folder is usually C:\Users\your user name\Documents, but it can be changed.
Sep 29, 2021 · Windows 10 disk management is a crucial function that system admins should perform. To manage Windows disks, IT must know the difference between volumes and partitions.
- Gary Olsen
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Nov 21, 2018 · The taskbar really is where all the action in Windows 10 happens. Here's a full tour of every little icon and how this hub of activity behaves.
