Want To Understand What All The Drives On A Computer Are For

J

Jonathan1990

Member
I have a Windows Vista. I does not have A or B on. I remember there being an A on my other computer but never a B drive. This is what I know.

A - Floppy Disk
B - ?????? (I was told it is an old thing we don't use any more)
C - Main Drive
D - ??????
E - DVD Disk Drive
F - Removable Disk Drive For MP3 Players
G - Removable Disk ??????
H - Revovable Disk ??????
I - Removable Disk ??????
J-R - Haven't A Clue
S - System Drive
T-Z - Haven't A Clue

I know that Drives F-I say Removable Disk and F comes up when I put an MP3 player in. J-R & T-Z are on the network but we never seem to use them so I haven't got a clue what they are for. Can you tell me what the're all for?
 
Well, it all depends on how many hard drives or partitions you have on your system and cdrom drives.

A - floppy
b - would be like an old tape drive - not used anymore
c - hard drive
d - cdrom drive


And then it all depends on if you have card reader installed on the system then you will see like 3 or 4 removable drives listed. Also if you have a printer that has a card reader on it you will see removable drives listed.

C should always be your system drive but you could actually change your drive letters to anything you want. cdrom drive you can change to Z if you wanted. System drive can't be changed.
 
As far as the A & B, these two drive letters are reserved for floppy drives. In early computers you might have 1 or 2 floppy drives, hence A: & B:.

Many computers only have 1 physical floppy drive (if any) and in that case, it is both A: and B:. This allows you to do something like "copy A:*.* B:" to copy the contents of a floppy to a second floppy. The OS (DOS or Windows) is aware you only have 1 physical drive so it will treat that 1 physical drive as two drives. When copying 1 floppy to another, data will be read into memory from floppy A: then you will be prompted to remove A: and insert B: so the data can be written to the second floppy.
 
So far as I am aware, with Windows you can't have X:\ because it creates a hidden partition with the repair tools, restores etc on it with the drive letter of X. John covered the rest
 
Aastii said:
So far as I am aware, with Windows you can't have X:\ because it creates a hidden partition with the repair tools, restores etc on it with the drive letter of X. John covered the rest
Click to expand...

May be with some pre-installed system, but none of my computers have hidden partitions, so I can have x:\ in all my computers.
Cheers
 
D, most likely, is your recovery partition.
F and later would be your computer ports (USB and card slots).
 
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