Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

superuser.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 280 posts

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#61

Post by limmeau »

iwwr wrote: post #44
julian37 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, or vice versa, put a bit of tape over the hole to make disks writable that weren't intended to be. Good times!

USB drives could use such a feature. write-lock : prevent it from beint written (and acquiring viruses) read-lock : prevent it from being read (and passing viruses), only showing the free space and being able to write only in the free space

I have a USB stick with a write-protect switch. Unfortunately, the switch has broken. Now the drive will contain 128MB of obsolete early-00s data until the bits diffuse away.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#63

Post by rasur »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #52

My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that…

Sounds a bit like you had a Sinclair ZX80.

Been there, done that ;)

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#65

Post by electromagnetic »

rbanffy wrote: post #48
Natsu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here and I'm not much older than you. Worse, my current computer has an A:\ drive. I don't know why I keep a 3.5" floppy drive around, exactly, because I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years, but I do have one. And that's nothing compared to the 8088 that's collecting dust. It has two floppy drives, a 10 MB (yes, MB, not GB) hard drive, a CGA card & monitor, a math coprocessor and as much RAM as it ca…

> I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years I have one computer (a Sun workstation) with a 3.5 drive that no longer works. The fun part is I cannot tell you in what year it broke.

Mine broke when the eject failed, I used a paper clip to pull it out, but lost the paper clip. When it started smoking I had to pull the floppy's power - thankfully I had the side open to my computer so I didn't have to turn the whole thing off before I caused an actual fire.

I think this was back in the early 2000's.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#66

Post by Qz »

pwg wrote: post #38
bhavin wrote: post #17

One might wonder why the first two letters are for floppy and not HDD. If you follow the drive letters, going from A to higher alphabets generally give you evolution of technology (ignoring network map Z:). A: - floppy C:/D: - HDD E: - CD/DVD F: - External Storage

Because MsDos, at least in its early versions, could not dynamically assign new drive letters to newly inserted disks. So the workaround, which is still with us years later in Windows 7, was to reserve at boot time the first two letters (A/B) for drives with removable media (i.e., floppy drives, there were no usb flash dongles in those days).

I don't think that's true for Vista or Windows 7. I have B:\ as a Backup partition from my second HD on both.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#67

Post by rmc »

maxklein wrote: post #43
redthrowaway wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 20 years, people won't understand iPods, or why you would have to physically carry around data anyway.

How would they play music when jogging or in the train then?

Their data connection will still work on the train or out and about. Obviously. It'll be like a mobile phone now, works everywhere (more or less).

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#68

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

rasur wrote: post #63
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #52

My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that…

Sounds a bit like you had a Sinclair ZX80. Been there, done that ;)

TRS-80 Model I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#70

Post by electromagnetic »

iwwr wrote: post #9

I remember a time when you needed to carry 30 floppies to be able to copy C&C:Red Alert... and it was worth it.

I just used the CD trick when playing multiplayer. You start the game with the disc in one computer and then eject and run into the next room to start the game on that computer.

I think 9/10ths of the games I played with my brother were exploited with this trick until the warez scenes started developing proper and timely released nocd cracks.

Post reply on HN