Comment on Does a cloned drive have the same drive letter as the original?
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I wouldn’t trust a random store with any irreplaceable data - and there’s likely no recourse for you when they fuck it up. Make sure everything important is backed up.
These days, Windows assigns drive letters almost randomly. Typically after a drive reconfiguration, it’ll just label the boot drive as C: and the next one as D:.
If you’re wondering where A: and B: went, those are for the floppy drives nobody has any more because drive letters are an ancient relic and need to die.
0x4E4F@lemmy.rollenspiel.monster 11 months ago
Unfortunatelly, drive letters are reminants from tye DOS days and early Windows days (anything that wasn’t NT based has to have drive letters), so they have to stay for backwards compatibility.
Actually, up until Windows 8, drive letters were required for booting as well (which can be seen im the safe mode boot screen). Windows 8 and above doesn’t require them though (can be seen in safe mode with debugging enabled), but they are there and will stay there for a very, very long time. Windows can’t just part ways with them, there are just way too many things tied to them… legacy stuff, but legacy stuff that everyone still uses.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Drive letters are remnants from precursors to DOS.
Also, letters are not inherent to hard drives, so they’re not “required” for booting. That’s a job for BIOS/UEFI.
0x4E4F@lemmy.rollenspiel.monster 11 months ago
Really? Try booting Windows XP from a drive that is not marked as C: somewhere in registry and in config files. Even if you do manage to change the root from C to something else, it simply refuses to boot, end of story. People have tried it, it just doesn’t work with. With Win8 and above, yes, it does work, but some programs will out right refuse to work (cuz they’re gonna look for C:\%WINDIR%\system32 for the libs it needs to run, and they won’t be able to find them).
But yes, you are correct, drive letters were in use before DOS.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’ll boot, Windows will just have its own problems afterwards.