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Ancient traditions
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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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I was adding a second drive to a Windows desktop the other day and was tempted to assign it
A:. I just couldn't do it, though. It felt like I was violating some unspoken rule.Knowing Windows there's some legacy piece of code that checks if there's a floppy in drive A: and assigning a drive to it makes the OS fail to boot or something.
Some dumbass at my workplace assigned a network folder to D:, and made it a department standard (along with 20 other network folders assigned their own drive letters) and so now you can't access external drives if you restart the computer with one plugged in.
Because windows assigns D:\ to the flash drive before user initialization, and then overwrites it with the network drive when they log in, which breaks both for that session.
..………. Fuck.
I wonder how UEFI treats it; diskette drives were kind of sacred in the old BIOS days. How modern Windows handles it is anyone's guess, I'm sure it's been rewritten by Copilot by now.
I 100% assumed the same thing. Lol
It's a code of honour at this point .... no one uses A: in respect for all those drives that died for our sins
About 15 years ago there was a company I did some work for (I was at an MSP at the time) who wanted to virtualize certain systems. Great. No problem. Except those systems needed to read floppies. Ok, I can pass it through. Except they wanted to get away from floppies. Great, let's get you a newer system from a different vendor because this one went out of business when NT4 was still the big dog. Nope, too much money and the process would change.
So I had to reregister every DLL by hand because the installation didn't work on Server 2008 r2. And every few months it would have to be done again because one of the guys thought himself a genius and kept messing up the janky ass workflow we put together to download info from thumb drives to a virtual floppy.
So plug in the drive, janky ass script creates a virtual floppy in drive A of the server, and manually (eventually I just wrote a script because I didn't want to get that call on a Saturday) register each DLL every so often. And they'd rather pay the company I worked for several hundred dollars a month than pay a couple of grand one time that would have paid for itself in less than a year.
lol .... I had this kind of argument with my wife for years.
She kept buying the smallest bottles of dish washing liquid for years ... if it was smaller, to her it was much cheaper. I kept telling her that the price for the small bottle was more expensive per liter of liquid compared to buying it all in bulk.
I kept telling her that if you just bought one giant bottle for the best price when it went on sale, you'd end up buying more liquid and saving money over time. I'd buy a big huge bottle every year or so and it would last us months, then she'd revert to buying small bottles again.
Eventually, she realized that it was cheaper in the long run to buying big bottles .... mostly because when you bought one giant bottle, you'd forget the problem altogether for about six months or even a year.
Heads up. Vendors are on to us. Bulk now equals convenience. Double check unit prices before assuming buying the larger quantity is more cost effective.
Sometimes there's is now a small, medium and large package and medium is the best buy.
I know an OAP who pays two lots of $59 a month for two mobile phones. 'you get more calls that way'. But it's a big data plan - even the smallest phone plans have unlimited calls. Heck, one is a flip phone with no data. Can't convince her she only needs to pay $23 each though.
If she's in the US several MVMOs have unlimited talk and text for like $10 a month
It’s curious, isn’t it, the way we sometimes construct these little personal systems of logic that—to an outside observer—seem slightly at odds with reality?
Oh thumb drive to virtual floppy sounds like when I had to work on old cnc machines that had a few modern upgrades
Don't worry about it. That rule hasn't been relevant in a long time since we no longer use floppy disks
My PC still has a floppy disc drive
Hipster?
Nah it’s just like 11 years old and I still had some floppies sitting around back then with stuff on it. I haven’t used it in years.
Even 11 years old, unless its an industrial computer... how does it have FDD connector?
Just plug in an ISA card, duh.
Seriously though you've sent me down a rabbit hole that doesn't have a satisfactory ending (yet). Some kind of LPC to FDC adapter seems to be potentially possible on some motherboards, but haven't found any concrete evidence of someone having done that yet.
Most practical solution is to use an external USB drive, strip the casing, print a plate and wire the cable to the onboard USB header on the mobo.
This may get further research 😂
You know, I actually don’t know, it was a gift from my father who paid for it to get built, I’ve never actually checked the connection…
I keep my storage hard drive assigned to B so the optical drive is still D.
You monster.
I assigned my 18TB HDD to A because my second drive is B and my main drive is C, so I have to complete the pattern or my brain will explode.
Make it G: violate unspoken rules.
If you have never assigned a drive to F: or G:, how can you even say you lived?