C
Char Jackson
A: and B: are no longer reserved, nor are any other drive letters
reserved, AFAIK.
reserved, AFAIK.
K
Ken Blake
Wow, they are *very* expensive! I'd much rather just buy a $15-20 US
floppy drive.
C
Char Jackson
Depending on the type of floppy image, it might be easiest, fastest,
and lowest cost, to simply extract the data from the images and put it
into another format.
J
John Williamson
How about a free emulator? :-Char said:
http://www.pendriveapps.com/virtual-floppy-drive/
Not bootable, unfortunately. Other emulators are available at the same
price.
P
Paul
The purpose of devices like that, is for legacy controller upgrading.Ken said:
For example, say you have some kind of NC machine, where the "input
program" is loaded from a floppy. After you've run off 10,000 designs
on the machine, the floppy drive wears out. Perhaps at that point,
you spend the $350, replacing the drive with something more
"solid state". The ancient computing device inside, might not have
USB or sophisticated I/O capability. And the floppy interface
might be the only I/O you can use. In which case, if they charge
an "arm and leg" for it, you pay it.
It's not intended for just any home computer, as a replacement for
a $20 drive. It's marketed to businesses, who can afford stuff like
that (where there is a payoff). For example, I could see a market
for a device, with Ethernet on one side, and floppy interface on
the other, where the people running the machine can just drop their
"design" file into the machine over Ethernet (file sharing). And
such a box might be cheaper than buying some $10,000 upgrade to
upgrade the embedded computer, whatever it is.
Paul
Z
Zaphod Beeblebrox
I guess technically they are not reserved, rather just not used for
anything other than floppies by convention. I regularly map B: to the
shared drive on our Build machine (nice mnemonic).
Likewise, I'm not aware of any other drive letters that are reserved -
and can't think of any others that ever were, at least not in the
DOS/Windows world.
--
Zaphod
Adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly),
manic self-publicist, terrible bad at personal relationships,
often thought to be completely out to lunch.
K
Ken Blake
W
Wolf K
On 27/02/2012 8:43 AM, Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote:
[...]
naming conventions linked to physical drive type and number (as
presented by BIOS) and partition type (primary vs extended). You simply
couldn't change them. The best you could do is assign a descriptive name to
the links shown in the menu/shell, but I can't recall whether that was
already possible in 3.x or came in later.
From NT onwards, Windows uses pointers (aliases) for the drives, which
is why you can assign any letters you like.
I think this aliasing should go a step further. You should be able to
name a drive/partition anything you like, and on multi-boot systems, all
OSs should respect the names you've assigned. IOW, BIOS should assign
letters by default, but when you rename the drive, BIOS should accept
that name. It's basically just a directory tree anyhow. AIUI, network
drives are already handled this way: from the user's POV, the network is
a directory tree. Everyone sees whatever they are permitted to see
regardless of which OS their machines run.
HTH
Wolf K.
[...]
In DOS/Win3.x/9x. there were reserved letters, ie, the OS had fixed
naming conventions linked to physical drive type and number (as
presented by BIOS) and partition type (primary vs extended). You simply
couldn't change them. The best you could do is assign a descriptive name to
the links shown in the menu/shell, but I can't recall whether that was
already possible in 3.x or came in later.
From NT onwards, Windows uses pointers (aliases) for the drives, which
is why you can assign any letters you like.
I think this aliasing should go a step further. You should be able to
name a drive/partition anything you like, and on multi-boot systems, all
OSs should respect the names you've assigned. IOW, BIOS should assign
letters by default, but when you rename the drive, BIOS should accept
that name. It's basically just a directory tree anyhow. AIUI, network
drives are already handled this way: from the user's POV, the network is
a directory tree. Everyone sees whatever they are permitted to see
regardless of which OS their machines run.
HTH
Wolf K.
Z
Zaphod Beeblebrox
That isn't reserved drive letters, that is a drive letter assignment
convention, two very different things. If they were reserved, you
couldn't use them for some other purpose, which isn't the case. In
DOS, you could always assign your CD-ROM or RamDrive to an arbitrary
drive letter that wasn't already being used, (and in some cases, you
could even "bump" a preassigned drive letter and re-use it for your
desired purpose) and once networks were in common usage, the same could
be done with mapped network drive letters.
G
Gene E. Bloch
In Windows 7 and Vista (maybe others?) you can mount a drive as though
it was a folder, so it ends up looking a bit like a *nix drive name. Or
at least a little bit like what you wrote.
Unfortunately, it's not honored by other OSes. And of course, I'm not
sure if you'd like it anyway
It's part of the assign drive letter dialog in Disk Management.
I use this capability for a drive sync program I use (Allway Sync) to
backup some USB devices, since the program used to deal badly with
changeable drive letters. It seems that the program now is able to
identify drives by their IDs, so I don't need the folders any more, but
habits can be hard to break.
It's not so good for a normal backup program if you forget to exclude
that folder name from a backup to that folder
W
Wolf K
I've mulled over all of your post, and here are the results. So far. ;-)
I have both W7 and XP on this machine (because there's no W7 driver for
my ancient and solidly built laser printer, now about 10 years old).
Each OS resides on its own physical disk. Each OS sees its boot
partition as C:, and assigns different letters to the other partitions.
It uses the standard DOS/Windows scheme: C: for its boot drive, then
D:, E; etc to other primary partitions and internal optical drive(s),
then logical drives on its own disk, then any others, then the external
drives. I haven't figured out how the external drive letters are
assigned, but it looks like USB port-number order.
Three points:
1) the names I've assigned to each partition and drive are seen correctly.
2) when an external drive is not powered up, or disconnected, its drive
letter is not assigned to another drive.
3) Linux partitions could be seen correctly lettered, but not read by
Windows. I removed Linux from this machine.
I infer the following:
Disk/partition ID occurs on several levels:
4) BIOS, which reports physical disks to the OS;
5) Disk boot record (partition table), which reports partition information;
6) OS, which assigns pointers ("letters") to the partitions reported by
the disks;
7) OS's alias list, which links user-assigned names to the pointers.
These names are written into each partition's track/sector map.
It appears that
8) Windows (and other OSs) can change the pointer values ("assign drive
letters", etc);
9) If a partition is visible to Windows (and other OSs), it can read and
report the partition name even if originally assigned by another OS.
All that matters to users is that names of disks/partitions/folders are
meaningful, and consistent across OSs. This is what's done on networks:
The name of any shared folder is seen by every user with permission to
see it, regardless of the OS of the machine on which it resides. The
underlying scheme of disk/partition/folder IDs matters only to the OS.
IMO, any file manager in any OS should display only the partition and
folder names assigned by whoever named them. If a sys-admin needs to see
things at a deeper level, well, that's what admin permissions are for.
HTH,
Wolf K.