Partition Magic tries to get around this by searching your drives etc. and correcting the references... it works some of the time - enough that I used it every time I changed drives around. Later C. Paul Abrahams wrote:

I've just been sweating through a common problem that exemplifies Microsoft's penchant for bad design: keeping drive letters straight when adding a hard drive or reconfiguring partitions. The problem, as most folks here probably know, is that if you add a hard drive or a disk partition to your system, drive letters change in a way that you cannot control or modify. That naturally messes up all references to files on the drives whose letters have changed.

And needless to say, Unix (ergo Linux) has a perfectly straightforward solution to the problem: all devices hang off the root filesystem via mounts. You rejigger a drive, you change /etc/fstab and that's the end of it.

Of course, Windows is stuck with the problem of backward compatibility. Yet ironically enough, at one time DOS (yes, DOS!) supported a workaround with the SUBST command that enabled you to redefine one drive letter into another. With SUBST you could work entirely with virtual drive letters and never have to reference the real ones. SUBST went out with the transition to Win 3.1, I believe; I haven't seen it for years.

The real maldesign, though, is that there is a simple way that MS could have its cake of backward compatibility and still provide flexibility in adding hard drives: provide a "reverse SUBST" that would associate a directory with a drive. In other words, something like C:\AUX_DRIVE would be associated with, say, the G: drive. That would make C:\ equivalent to the Linux root, and all file references would then be to locations on the C drive.

Why not?

Paul

Hello, Paul. Actually, Windows 2000 allows you to do this, to a degree. If you add a new hard drive to a system, when you partition it out, you can select any drive letter you like (NT also allows this), or you can tell the system to mount it to a directory under a different drive. As far as I know, you can only do this with hard drives, though, not removable media. However, you can assign a different drive letter to a removable media drive. Credit where it is due, MS have addressed this issue at long last. I went off drive letters a long time ago when my local drives now run up as far as I: on my W2K box. What with multiple hard drives, CDs, DVD, CD Burner, smart media adapter etc, it starts to get a bit silly after a while. And, if you're interested, MS has also done a half-brained attempt at symbolic links at last, too. Unfortunately, it only happens on RIS volumes (Remote Installation Service) and is something the system does automatically to save space on said volume. User volumes still do not have this capability. Bye for now, Stuart. -----Original Message----- From: pwa@chmls20.mediaone.net [mailto:pwa@chmls20.mediaone.net]On Behalf Of Paul Abrahams Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2001 9:36 AM To: SuSE listserve Subject: [SLE] [OT] Microsoft maldesign and drive letters <snip> The real maldesign, though, is that there is a simple way that MS could have its cake of backward compatibility and still provide flexibility in adding hard drives: provide a "reverse SUBST" that would associate a directory with a drive. In other words, something like C:\AUX_DRIVE would be associated with, say, the G: drive. That would make C:\ equivalent to the Linux root, and all file references would then be to locations on the C drive. Why not? Paul </snip>

Paul Abrahams a écrit :

I've just been sweating through a common problem that exemplifies Microsoft's penchant for bad design: keeping drive letters straight when adding a hard drive or reconfiguring partitions. The problem, as most folks here probably know, is that if you add a hard drive or a disk partition to your system, drive letters change in a way that you cannot control or modify. That naturally messes up all references to files on the drives whose letters have changed.

And needless to say, Unix (ergo Linux) has a perfectly straightforward solution to the problem: all devices hang off the root filesystem via mounts. You rejigger a drive, you change /etc/fstab and that's the end of it.

Of course, Windows is stuck with the problem of backward compatibility. Yet ironically enough, at one time DOS (yes, DOS!) supported a workaround with the SUBST command that enabled you to redefine one drive letter into another. With SUBST you could work entirely with virtual drive letters and never have to reference the real ones. SUBST went out with the transition to Win 3.1, I believe; I haven't seen it for years.

The real maldesign, though, is that there is a simple way that MS could have its cake of backward compatibility and still provide flexibility in adding hard drives: provide a "reverse SUBST" that would associate a directory with a drive. In other words, something like C:\AUX_DRIVE would be associated with, say, the G: drive. That would make C:\ equivalent to the Linux root, and all file references would then be to locations on the C drive.

Why not?

'cause it's bright. Nothing for M$ here. -- Alain DIDIERJEAN 01 64 23 10 15 I was born too young ~adj~ 06 74 53 71 81 in too old a world...