Comment by rado
Comment by rado 3 days ago
Windows drive letters are ridiculous. Use an external drive for e.g. video editing, its letter can be stolen by another drive, you can’t work anymore.
Comment by rado 3 days ago
Windows drive letters are ridiculous. Use an external drive for e.g. video editing, its letter can be stolen by another drive, you can’t work anymore.
Which can be trivially mapped to directories for aliasing. Just like Linux.
Windows NT and UNIX are much more similar than many people realize; Windows NT just has a giant pile of Dos/Win9x compatibility baked on top hiding how great the core kernel design actually is.
I think this article demonstrates that very well.
> [ .. ] Inserting an USB drive before boot breaks booting.
Only if the machine's BIOS is configured to give bootable USB devices boot-order priority. So it's not about Linux -- in fact, the same thing would happen on a Windows machine.
Remember that in a properly configured Linux install, the boot partition is identified by UUID, not hardware identifier (in /etc/fstab). Consequently if you change a drive's hardware connection point, the system still boots.
Only if you have a broken kernel cmdline or fstab that references /dev/sd* instead of using the UUID=xyz or /dev/disk/by-id/xyz syntax.
> Only if you have an old-style kernel cmdline or fstab that references /dev/sd* instead of using the UUID=xyz or /dev/disk/by-id/xyz syntax.
Fixed that for you. It used to be normal to use the device path (/dev/hd* or /dev/sd*) to reference the filesystem partitions. Using the UUID or the by-id symlink instead is a novelty, introduced precisely to fix these device enumeration order issues.
I remember vividly when a user couldn't access his smb drive from Windows because both his printer and also the computer's case came with one of these multi-cardreaders with n slots and the drive letters collided. That's when I learned that smb drive letters don't even come from the "global" pool of drive letters, because, and this is obvious in hindsight, they are a per-user affair (credentials and all that).
I think the concept of drive letters is flawed.
You can fix the drive letter assignments at any time if they become a problem, or use a directory as a mount point if that's less troublesome. (Win-R, diskmgmt.msc)
If you go with the defaults, they might be. But if you manually define the letter for your external drive, it will keep it forever. (I have my external drive set to X. I’m not sure if Windows would respect that assignment if I had plugged in 19 other drives, but that is never going to happen.)
Not while it's mounted. This is akin to complaining that on Linux if you unplug a flash drive and plug in a different one that second drive could "steal" /mnt/sdb1 or whatever.