Drive Letters

  • Thread starter Thread starter Marty Felker
  • Start date Start date
M

Marty Felker

If people have a dual boot system with the Vista Bootloader saying Windows
or Previous Windows what are the drive letters both Windows OS see's.

In my setup each Windows see ITSELF as Drive C. Vista sees XP x64 as drive
D and XP x64 sees Vista as Drive H.

What order have people installed Windows? I would guess most people install
Windows XP (or Win2k) and then install Vista.

Does the drive letters mean anything significant? The CD-ROM may have
different Drive Letters on each OS.
 
Marty Felker said:
Does the drive letters mean anything significant? The CD-ROM may have
different Drive Letters on each OS.
Click to expand...

CD-ROM drive letters are easily changed via Computer Management off
the Administrator Tools menu. It won't let you change hard drive
partition letters because too many things would break.

The one situation where drive letters become significant is when an
application stores absolute paths in some settings store (be it the
registry, an INI file or a simple properties file.) If that app is
looking for something on the XP partition known as the C: drive, and
that partition is known as D: under Vista, you are obviously going to
run into problems.
=============================
Guy Rouillier
 
Each of my OS's are internally consistent when running, so like you I really
don't care what my drive letters are. I name each volume anyway so I can
tell at a glance where I am navigating. The names persist across OS's and
just make more sense. Drive letters are dinosaurs in any case and certainly
not as meaningful as names.
 
Not exactly true. Only the system drive(s)/partition(s) cannot be
re-assigned a drive letter in this manner.
Any other drives (backup, data, etc) can be changed or shuffled to use any
available drive letters. How this may affect installations and programs
depends on how the drives were used, and what may have been installed to
them.
 
Drive letters are dinosaurs in any case and certainly not as meaningful as
names.
Click to expand...

Accepting that is the way things are going I just tried:

dir \\DataBack\Temp

and get:
The network path was not found.

I know you can do this with share names but until you can do it with
volume names don't we still need drive letters?
 
Jeff Gaines pretended :
On 29/11/2006 in message <[email protected]> Colin
Barnhorst wrote:
Click to expand...
Accepting that is the way things are going I just tried:
Click to expand...
dir \\DataBack\Temp
Click to expand...
and get:
The network path was not found.
Click to expand...
I know you can do this with share names but until you can do it with volume
names don't we still need drive letters?
Click to expand...

I already mentioned this lacking feature before in this NG under the
same subject
there is absolutely no way you can browse the file system using the
names of the partitions
however, if you try \\..\partitionname then the underlying folder are
resolved
so there is actually some access to the file system possible this way
but never fully developed or so I gather
so under windows, yes, you still need drive letters AFAIK

grtz
 
I certainly agree with theabsurdity of drive letters. When I boot Windows
XPx64 into recovery console from the CD and run dispart - drive H: suddenly
becomes Drive F:

Go figure. I did once have a problem renaming the CD-ROM drive letter,
because I wanted to. Windows then would not recognize the physical drive!
Forget how I fixed that - probably had to re-install. Since Linux looks a
devices there is no such problems. I try to remember not to copy files from
XP to Vista - but as you say it probably doesn't matter.

Thanks
 
Back
Top