Did Microsoft forget their alphabets?

[alsiladka]

guyz,

u have A as the floppy drive, the second drive is labeled c, now my english says it is a "B" c d

why did microsoft keep it away? any ideas

[EchoNoise]

B drive is usually reserved for another floppy drive... wether it be 3½ or 5¼ drives... you can set a removable drive to B... but yeah

[tim]

In the olden days when floppies were the main storage media they got used a lot.

To increase storage and enable disk-2-disk copies there were normally 2 floppy drives installed.

These were always A: and B:.

It's a hang over from those days that these 2 drive letters are always reserved for floppy drives.

Edited November 21, 2005 by tim

[net_user]

i have 2 floppys....

my 2nd one is a usb sitting on my desk....so i don't have to reach down each time...

i'm lazy that way...

[Jeanolb]

Right !

And believe it or not...but I still have drive B:\ as a 5"1/4 real flexible floppy (1.2MB) on a dual floppy drive (3"1/2 up, 5"1/2 donw).

Because I started using computer languages in 1974, Yes sir !, I still have some old floppys with files I made at that time and in the '80. (ea, some small algorithms).

I do have one specific computer with multi-boot option: DOS 6.22 > Win 98E > Win 2K. this make it easy for old stuff !

Cheers,

Jean

[Synapse]

holy crap.. people still use floppies?

i put a floppy drive in my comp just in case i ever needed it, i've only used it like 3 times in a total of 3 years. lol.

[net_user]

holy crap.. people still use floppies?

i put a floppy drive in my comp just in case i ever needed it, i've only used it like 3 times in a total of 3 years. lol.

i put winnt.sif on the floppy when i do a clean install....

also..use floppys to flash bios's, flash server bios's/arrary's/backplanes. some people use it for ghosting.

mostly to do that kinda stuff....not to store data on.

[HyperHacker]

Floppies are also great to boot from. Practically every computer ever made can boot from a floppy.

But yeah, there's your answer. A: is always floppy drive 1 and B: is always floppy drive 2. I think Windows can remap them though.

[FAT64]

When I built my latest computer, I utterly refused to include a floppy drive. Here we are in the 21st Century and people still use floppy disks?? They don't store very much data (1.32Mb) they're unreliable and easily damaged. You don't have to boot from them anymore, so why have one? They haven't changed for at least 15 years, imagine if other components hadn't changed in 15 years, where would we be?

Long live USB memory!

[os2fan2]

Ah! the days of real DOS, when you could had A: *and* B: drive, rather than loading the floppy drive by a device driver, and using CAS: device, which is what my first puter did.

Anyway, we still are stuck with DOS 1.0 mentality, so A: and B: are defaulted to floppy disks. Mind you, we also have the stupid edlin-diddling (oh! you're running edlin from DOS 3.21 on 3.20! stop it!). Try running programs from inside some different version of Windows, eg run a proggie under Windows 2000, when you're in the windows xp directory!

Wendy

[Aaron_]

Floppies?? I used to use them years ago....

But not anymore. Those devices are totally outdated.

[BigDaddy]

Any chance I could change in Win2k or XP that B: letter would be used for USB FLASH DRIVES?

Since USB DRIVES are like FLOPPY now

[spacesurfer]

I still need the floppy--USB drives or no USB drives. Reason is simple... say you want to modify your Ghost Boot Disk or Win 98 Boot Disk. You want to edit your config.sys and autoexec.bat files. I'm pretty sure everyone knows how to put them on CD but for small changes and testing, it takes a h*ll of a lot longer to change burn, reboot, test... then modifying your instantly rewritable floppy which you can do in DOS mode.

Oh! and I've never been able to run Ghost from USB. Says I don't have enough memory available. Not sure why since I can run it from floppy!!!! Anyone have any ideas why. If I can run Ghost from USB, I might as well throw the towel for floppies!

When I built my latest computer, I utterly refused to include a floppy drive. Here we are in the 21st Century and people still use floppy disks?? They don't store very much data (1.32Mb) they're unreliable and easily damaged. You don't have to boot from them anymore, so why have one? They haven't changed for at least 15 years, imagine if other components hadn't changed in 15 years, where would we be?

Long live USB memory!

[pmshah]

When I built my latest computer, I utterly refused to include a floppy drive. Here we are in the 21st Century and people still use floppy disks?? They don't store very much data (1.32Mb) they're unreliable and easily damaged. You don't have to boot from them anymore, so why have one? They haven't changed for at least 15 years, imagine if other components hadn't changed in 15 years, where would we be?

Long live USB memory!

Drive a: & b: are leftovers from the days of 360 kb floppy drives. One usually held the OS while the other your software & data files.

They did change but no one accepted the extra expense. Perhaps the developers were not interested in their succes. You had floppy drives with 100 MB capacity & LS-120 drives with 120 MB capacity. Until they came up with bootable CDs you still had to boot & start the setup from floppydrives. Even though lately the floppy drives have been missing from the PCs you still emulate the same drive to do a whole lot of recovery & istallation work.

You could try vfdwin under xp to create virtual floppy, load the image file, edit your files just like a floppy disk save the image file & use a cdrw to test. Any day a much more reliable option then a floppy disk.

You can run Ghost from floppy emulated cd rom without a problem.

Edited November 27, 2005 by pmshah

[Andromeda43]

They haven't changed for at least 15 years, imagine if other components hadn't changed in 15 years, where would we be?

Of course they have! I used to have to pay $30 or more for a new 3.5" FD and now I can get one, white faced or black faced for just $7. Now that's change.

Only those who have History with the home computer, really know how many things that have really not changed in the past fifteen years or more. Just look at the AT style keyboard. It's as ageless as the steering wheel, that hasn't really changed in nearly 100 years.

The 3.5" FD separates the men from the boys, so to speak. The MEN still have them, use them and love them.

The Boys, (nerds, geeks and gamers) don't even know what they are.

And that's too bad, because the 3.5" FD still has a very vital place in the world of the Personal Computer.

Using a FD is the quickest way to run hardware diagnostics, boot up a failing system or just transfer a file from one PC to another. (that's by the way called "Sneaker Net")

And, they're cheap, erasable and reusable! I have 3.5" floppies that are over ten years old and I still use them.

Just reformat and GO! Can't do that with a CD.

I had one customer that was given a new HP computer for Christmas 2004. It came with NO floppy drive, but a space for it. My customer practically begged me to install a 3.5" floppy drive for them as they had over 150 3.5" floppy disks with old family photos and documents on them that they wanted to be able to access.

Since I always carry two floppy drives with me (one white and one black) and FD cables, the install was quick and went off without a hitch. Abling up the drive in the bios finished the job and again I had one very happy customer.

Just because something is below the cutting edge of technology or a few years old does not automaticly make it bad.

Heck, I'm over 60 and I'm still functional.....mostly.

If I had room in my case, I'd still have a 5.25" drive in there too, as I've got over 300 of the old 5.25" disks loaded with games and utilities. I do have two of the 5.25" drives, but they are on the parts shelf, not in my PC. If I did install one, it would be Drive "B". That drive letter is still "RESERVED".

Happy Holidays everyone

Andromeda43