31
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
31 points (86.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35681 readers
1235 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.