• 6 Posts
  • 106 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • I think there is just way too little data on the subject.

    Like, for example, I used to organize some local PsyTrance gigs with DJs mostly (also artists, but the DJ sets were cheaper 🤷) and I know for a fact that at least 1 of the people that DJed on the gigs has a PhD in genetics. The other one, I’m not sure (he said he did have a PhD, but he was just way too plastered at the time to take him seriously).

    I think most of them are genuinly afraid to actually say they’re highly educated in this or that field, because of how society might look at them if they do - you’re a decadent human being, you don’t deserve your PhD. Not to mention that for some of these people, this is like an alter ego for them. Some of them have normal 9 to 5 jobs, just like to do drugs and music on the weekends… I don’t have anything against this, of course, but society views these things differently 🤷.


  • 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 😂… 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.