Comment by kijin 3 days ago
I remember when A and B were commonly used drive letters. C was a luxury. D was outright bourgeois.
But for some reason, drive letters starting with C feel completely natural, too. Maybe it's because C is also the first note in the most widely known musical scale. We can totally afford to waste two drive letters at the start, right?
Oh bless you and your youngsterness. A and B, by convention, were reserved for floppy drives and C was typically the first hard drive.
phantom drive B is explicitly mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment#Order_...
the linked source checks out. diskcopy will also do this for you if you give it source = dest.
D was typically a CD-ROM drive. So when CD-ROMs went the way of the dinosaurs, where did D go ? Is it always some kind of SYS drive nowadays ?
It's just whatever happens to end up there? That's why D was typically the CD-ROM: A was the first floppy drive, B the (typically absent) second floppy drive, C the only hard disk, and then D was the next free letter.
On my laptop, D is the SD card slot. On my desktop, it's the 2nd SSD.
When recordable CDs were brand new, we set up a station at work with two hard drives (C: and D:) and the CD burner (E:). Naturally, the CDR burning software was hard-coded for D: but didn't mention that anywhere (including the error message). Took us a few hours to figure it out.
"That's why D was typically the CD-ROM:"
We used to set our machines so the CD-ROM was always drive L. This way we always had 'room' to add HDs so there was no gap in the alphabetical sequence. Drive D - data drive, E - swapfile, etc.
Test and external drives (being temporary) were assigned letters further down than L. Sticking reasonably rigidly to this nomenclature avoided stuff-up such as cloning an empty drive onto one with data on it (cloning was a frequent activity).
Incidentally, this rule applied to all machines, a laptop with HD would have C drive and L as the CD-ROM. Machines with multiple CD-ROMs would be assigned L, M and so on.
I always used J: (I didn’t expect to need to add that many hard drives).
I mainly did it so that CD installs wouldn’t lose their install drive since even Windows tracked it by the absolute path. Not as important with everything installed by download and Windows copying the install media to the hard drive anyway.
After C:, it really is just allocated in order.
Between CD/DVD drives, writers, Zip Drives, and extra hard drives, it wasn't unusual for a workstation to naturally end up with G: or H:, before mapped network storage became common.
> A was the first floppy drive, B the (typically absent) second floppy drive
As another commenter mentioned, when you didn't have a second floppy drive, A: and B: mapped to two floppy disks in the same floppy drive, with DOS pausing and asking you to insert the other floppy disk when necessary. Which explains why, even on single-floppy computers, the hard disk was at C: and not B: (and since so much software ended up expecting it, the convention continued even on computers without any floppy disk drive).
Depends on your setup. These days, I have a D drive for sharing data with the Linux install I never use. I used to have a D drive for user data (to keep them safe when reinstalling Windows) back in the 9x/XP days (and my CD drive was E).
I also use the drive letter assignment feature, so my external USB drive is always drive X.
> I remember when A and B were commonly used drive letters. C was a luxury. D was outright bourgeois.
Our first home computer (1989 or 1990?) was a 386SX with a 40MB hard disk (so maybe we were bourgeois). My dad had to partition it into a 32MB C drive and an 8MB D drive, because the DOS version (3.3?) had a 32MB maximum filesystem size. It had two separate 5.25 inch floppy drives, a 1.2MB and a 360KB - although the 1.2MB drives could read 360KB disks, they couldn’t write them in a form readable by 360KB drives, or something like that. And later (circa 1991) we got a 3.5 inch floppy drive too, which became drive A, the 1.2MB became drive B, and the 360KB was relegated to drive E. The FDC that came with the computer (back then they were ISA cards, hadn’t been integrated with the motherboard yet) only supported two drives, so he had to buy a new one that supported four.