Is it okay to assign a drive with the letter B on Windows 10?

Is it okay to assign a drive with the letter B on Windows 10?

I can't believe I never actually thought about this. Why do we skip A and B?

You should avoid using A and B but I don't think Windows will stop you from using them anymore

because they were reserved for floppies

A: and B: were assigned to floppy drives back in the DOS days, and it stuck.

>underage

A and B were used for the first and second floppy drives on DOS machines.

A and B were for the primary and secondary floppy drives, originally. We generally don't have those anymore, and haven't remapped the lettering scheme.

A and B are diskette drives, C is the hard disk drive. Legacy holdover.

i think it was because A and B where used for floppy drives back in the day

I'm not sure but I heard they were for floppy drives (whatever those are lol!)

it's because A and B where floppy drives

A and B were reserved for save buttons.

hehe lel fl00py dr!ves hehe XD

What I know is that since Windows 10 1709 syskey has been removed. Is it okay to assign a drive with a letter previously reserved for floppies though? I have no idea.

The A, B, C nomenclature in Windows is absolutely disgusting.

I don't know user. Perhaps it had something to do with Floppy drives.

I read somewhere that it is because of flobby diqettes.

They're still reserved for floppy drives but you can still assign A and B to removable drives if you don't have any floppy drives.

Where can you get cheap floppy drives? Why didn't the tech stay?

literally obsessed

You can assign any drive letter to any drive you want except C because Windows will automatically pick C for itself I believe. Even if you actually used a floppy disk drive and A and B were used it would just pick the next available letter. A and B a reserved because older software may assume A/B are floppy drives.

yeah i know who the fuck would use letters to name their disks anyway

Hey user, A and B were for the floppy drives.

Can you assign the system drive to A:, which seems the most logical?

Also, not being a window's user: does the file path to external/removable media switch around depending on what order you plug them in? If so that's embarrassing.

In an IBM compatible BIOS, the disks are numbered 1-3, which naturally translates into A, B, and C. Microsoft didn't invent it either.

You can get a floppy drive for basically as much as the shipping would cost on eBay, the tech didn't stay because it sucks.

Never mind guys

I was going to label the Media drive with M: and the backup drive with B: but then I realised that the backup drive would be listed before the system drive, and that would be annoying, so I'll just label the backup drive N:

A and B are still technically reserved for floppy drives in Windows, and A for the harddisk isn't really the most logical anyway. See , disks 1-2 are diskette drives and disk 3 is the hard disk.

In regard to your second question, no.

>skipping L and K

I understand L died but

Not really comparable.
For one, a drive letter is more of a mounpoint, as it becomes part of the path. If you were to use /mnt/a, /mnt/b, /mnt/c, etc as your mountpoints in *nix you'd be retarded.

>Also, not being a window's user: does the file path to external/removable media switch around depending on what order you plug them in? If so that's embarrassing.

If you unplug a drive and plug in a new one Windows may assign the letter of the old one to the new drive. Then when you plug the old drive back in the drive might be assigned a new letter. This doesn't happen randomly though. You have to power off the OS, unplug one drive and plug in another, then boot windows back up and let it assign the drive a letter, then power windows back down and plug in the old drive back in and power it back up.

It's a media drive, not a kedia or a ledia drive

jeez

That's fair, but then Windows has a retarded system for mounting disks in general. It'd be just as retarded if they used any other naming scheme for it.

Aesthetic af.

Yeah but M and N were literal backups, L was the original

Weren't you paying attention

Sorry I'll shut up now

How does Windows address removable media then?

As an example, OSX uses the drive name so the mount point doesn't matter. A la:

/Volumes/External\ HD/Music/Audiobooks/Acemoglu\ and\ Robinson/Acemoglu\ and\ Robinson\ -\ Why\ Nations\ Fail\ Disc\ 01.mp3

The drive letter is just the path to the root directory on a certain partition. To access the disk itself you'd use \\.\PhysicalDrive0, for example.

Does Windows ever "run out" of drive assignments? (since there are only 26 letters)

Obviously an edge case, but could happen if you were setting up a raid or something.

Windows supports mount points which it will use if it runs out of drive letters

no you idort M is the original, N is the only drive I'm using for backup

Windows assigns drive letters based on whoever gets there first. Every drive letter after C is fair game. The OS will initialize permanent disks first which means they usually get the first few letters then removable disks get whatever is after that.

You can run out of them but there's a few ways to work around it. The more useful way is that you can simply mount any disk you want under a directory and skip drive letters altogether. You can also unassign drive letters if you need to.

...actually I just noticed this is all fucked up! HFS and other partitions are reported by their capacity (what you'd expect), but APFS by occupied space. I assume this is a bug not a feature?

(APFS seems to be fucked in a lot of ways)

iirc it starts naming drives AA, AB, AC, AD, etc.

Apparently A and B were for the floppy drives.

It doesn't.

>M is the original
this faggot ass pansy? really?

...

>Why didn't the tech stay?

They only held 1.44Mb each, and were relatively fragile compared to CDs and USB drives.

Since Windows 10 basically dropped support for floppy drives, drives letters A and B can be used for anything really. Not limited to removable stuff

You'd think the A: and B: hard-code would have gone whenever 16bit support was dropped.

They were also incredibly slow. A lot of people probably don't remember that part because they only stored 1.44MB but they had transfer speeds of like 100KBs at best

They also all had boot sector viruses.

Do not miss those days.

...

They were reserved for floppy drives, a legacy feature that most computers don't use anymore

Yes, I named mine, J.

There is most likely some stupid reason for it like the Windows 9 thing where programs think Windows 9 was Windows 98 if you even believe that

B was not always an actual second floppy disk drive. If software had hardcoded drive paths and specifically asked for B: and you weren't rich enough to actually own two floppy disk drives the OS would just redirect those calls to A: instead.

Is this actually why they skipped 9?

16 bit support was never dropped though, NTVDM still exists in 32 bit versions of Windows. It doesn't exist in 64 bit versions because you can't use virtual 8086 mode from long mode and MS doesn't want to emulate it for whatever reason. Anyway, you've been able to use A and B at least as far back as XP (i never had any reason to try prior to XP), they are reserved for floppy drives but you can assign them manually if you don't have floppy drives.

Win32 API doesn't work that way, and Windows is already capable of version spoofing. Windows 10 (NT 10.0) reports as Windows 8 (NT 6.2) to programs that aren't "Windows 10-aware", and compatibility mode is also just a form of version spoofing.

The source of the claim is some unsourced reddit screenshot