B drive?

As far as I understand it B drive was usually for the 5.12" disk (those were the days). So now that has gone extinct, why is B drive still reserved?

I have never tried to reassign drive name to B drive though. Maybe I should reassign my CD drive to B drive

Both A and B drive have been traditionally reserved for floppies with C being reserved for the hard drive.  5.25" or 3.5" floppy can be A: or B: or both actually.. it's just that A: usually got read first during boot so it made more sense to use the 3.5" as the floppy boot rather than the smaller and less reliable 5.25" floppy.

When I still had a floppy drive, I renamed it from '3.5" Floppy' to 'Abort, Retry, Fail?' in Windows.  Not many people got the joke. :(

Where is this, in /mnt, or /media? mount doesn't show any a or b drives.

I'm not so certain about the "less reliable" bit.

I have had so many 3.5" disks fail on me it isn't funny. 5.25" also developed bad sectors, but at a far lower rate than the 3.5" ones. The plastic case on the 3.5" seemed to do diddly.

I'd be very surprised if 3.5" disks had a lower error/byte ratio than 5.25".

>>3 had better be a joke.

>>1
One word: legacy. The trouble with Windows-based systems is that they still cling to many standards of their DOS heritage, drives A: and B: being one such standard. Some software *still* expects A: and B: to be floppy drives.

>>4
That is the case nowadays, but it didn't used to be. Back when 3.5" disks were the standard for data storage they actually seemed to be made better (both the drives and the disks). Back then you could buy a pack of 100 disks and maybe one or two would turn out to be duff. Nowadays it seems you get one or two bad disks in a pack of ten. I don't think the quality control is there any more.

I found that I could copy floppies without the hard drive by copying things from A: to B:. It would copy the disk into memory and then ask me to insert a disk into the B: drive, at which point I would remove the disk and put a blank one in. Didn't work if I tried to copy A: to A:

5.25" discs were:
- Faster
- Much more reliable
- Cheaper

3.5" discs are:
- Stupid
- Shitty
- Sony's

>>6
All OSes currently in use have legacies. Think of all the stone age apeshit that made its way into Linux. X is a good example of it.

>>6
I must disagree. I used 3.5" between 1990-1998, and I can honestly say they were uniformly shit, although they proceeded to get worse after 95 or so. If that era wasn't when "3.5 disks were the standard for data storage" then I don't know what was.

In my experience, 5.25" were quite a bit more reliable.

>>9
Perhaps so. I'm comparing it when all I used was the older Double Density disks, instead of the High Density ones. I was an Amiga kid up until about 1997, and they mostly used ~880kb DD disks. Very reliable - it was very rare to have one go permanently bad on me.

None of my 5 1/4 DOS games work :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment

You can strategically place a magnet on a 5.25 so that it sticks to a filing cabinet, without data loss. 3.5s are too fat.

>>4
>>9
I have to agree, I think it was the case too. They may as well have left them sitting open. Only takes on average 4 months to develop bad sectors for me.