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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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I wouldn't trust a random store with any irreplaceable data - and there's likely no recourse for you when they fuck it up. Make sure everything important is backed up.
These days, Windows assigns drive letters almost randomly. Typically after a drive reconfiguration, it'll just label the boot drive as C: and the next one as D:.
If you're wondering where A: and B: went, those are for the floppy drives nobody has any more because drive letters are an ancient relic and need to die.
Unfortunatelly, drive letters are reminants from the DOS and early Windows days (anything that isn't NT 6.2 kernel based or above, has to have drive letters), so they have to stay for backwards compatibility.
Actually, up until Windows 8, drive letters were required for booting as well (which can be seen in the safe mode boot screen). Windows 8 and above doesn't require them though (can be seen in safe mode with debugging enabled), but they are there and will stay there for a very, very long time. Windows can't just part ways with them, there are just way too many things tied to them... legacy stuff, but legacy stuff that everyone still uses. Like try mounting a network drive without a drive letter, lol ๐... or anything for that matter without a letter, you can't. It's how Windows works. It's so deep into the kernel, that there is no way to remove it without breaking stuff left and right.
Drive letters are remnants from precursors to DOS.
Also, letters are not inherent to hard drives, so they're not "required" for booting. That's a job for BIOS/UEFI.
Really? Try booting Windows XP from a drive that is not marked as C: somewhere in registry and in config files. Even if you do manage to change the root from C to something else, it simply refuses to boot, end of story. People have tried it, it just doesn't work. With Win8 and above, yes, it does work, but some programs will out right refuse to work (cuz they're gonna look for C:\%WINDIR%\system32 for the libs it needs to run, and they won't be able to find them).
The only exception to this rule is WinPE (for WinXP), and that is a hacky setup, not officially supported by MS. It can be done, but it takes a looong time to actually make it bootable under any drive letter (anything that's not C).
But yes, you are correct, drive letters were in use before DOS.
It'll boot, Windows will just have its own problems afterwards.
Ummm... as I said, everything up until Windows 7 won't boot, not unless is WinPE based. If it's a regular install, no, it won't. Windows 8 and above, yes, it will boot... and it won't throw errors. Will everything regarding 3rd party software work? No. Can it be fixed? No, no source available. Then what's the point of booting from anything other than C? IDK, you tell me ๐.