Using B: or even A: as drive letters


  1. Posts : 118
    W10Pro x 4
       #1

    Using B: or even A: as drive letters


    I stumbled of a support question in a game forum, the guy had bought a new HDD and seemingly assigned its drive letter to B: .

    Now, for us older geeks we do recall that A and B was reserved for floppy, but it seems Windows still has issues using those letter for primary drive designation. I searched a bit and found this:
    You can assign the letters C through Z to each drive on your computer. A and B are usually reserved for floppy disk drives, but if your computer does not have floppy disk drives, you can assign A and B to volumes.
    So when I built a new computer recently with two internal drives, one for the OS and one for data, I thought, hey!, I’ll make my data drive “A”. I felt all rebellious until I discovered that Windows will not index drives lettered A or B.

    Took me quite a while to figure out what the problem was, but I found some other people who suffered the same issue when they used A or B for a [primary] drive. As soon as I assigned that drive a different letter, windows indexed the drive. So much for being rebellious.
    from: What Are the Windows A: and B: Drives Used For? which is from 2015.

    Have we not advanced further in drive management?
      My Computers


  2. Posts : 268
    Windows 10 Pro x64 v22H2
       #2

    We may have our own reservations about Windows and how it works but Windows reservation of drive letters come first
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 17,661
    Windows 10 Pro
       #3

    Coram Daes said:
    Have we not advanced further in drive management?
    Windows drive management is pretty advanced and logical. A and B are reserved for removable drives (not only floppy drives, any removable drive) therefore no indexing. There's nothing to prevent users to use them for instance for CD / DVD drives or hard disks not needing to be indexed like backup drive which only contains image backups and will usually be disconnected when not doing a backup.*
      My Computer


  4. Posts : 13,895
    Win10 Version 22H2 Pro and Home, Win11 Pro and Home
       #4

    One thing I ran into with drive lettering is that Windows automatically assigned Z: to the 1st NAS drive I attached to my Router then when I attached the 2nd drive Windows assigned Y:, digging into information online indicated that is by default but can be changed later.

    As for A: I found that if the BIOS has a setting for it and there is a pin socket for the cable on the motherboard Windows will have issues even though I had disabled that drive in the BIOS.
      My Computers


 

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