DOS ain't dead

Third Floppy Drive ? Twenty Six Drives ? (Announce)

posted by bretjohn  , Rio Rancho, NM, 16.07.2021, 22:01

The number of different drives you can have is not a simple answer. There are simply too many ways to do things.

While booting things are VERY different than what can happen after you've booted. You can, for example, boot from a floppy (A: or B:) or a hard/USB drive (C:) or a CD (which may create a RAM disk of some sort) or even boot virtually across a network. There may be other ways to boot as well.

When first booting, only A: and B: can be floppies. After booting, any drive letter can be a floppy. E.g., my USB drivers (at least in their current state) never assign a USB floppy to A: or B: but assign it to some other drive letter. There are also utilities like SUBST and JOIN that let you assign drive letters in all kinds of unusual ways if you want. Those utilities will even let you assign more than one drive letter to the exact same device (which, believe it or not, is sometimes very useful -- I actually use that feature all the time).

In DOS, the main thing you need to worry about is making sure you put a LASTDRIVE=Z in CONFIG.SYS so you can assign drive letters from A-Z, though exactly what kind of device each drive letter is assigned to is not consistent. Also, later versions of MS-DOS would let you put LASTDRIVE=32 in CONFIG.SYS which would allow 32 drive "letters" (though accessing the drive "letters" higher than Z: is very problematic and usually not worth the grief it causes). I don't know if any other versions of DOS besides MS-DOS will let you do that or not.

Complete thread:

• Third Floppy Drive ? Twenty Six Drives ? - CLINT, 16.07.2021, 15:40 (Emulation)
  • Third Floppy Drive ? Twenty Six Drives ? - Oso2k, 16.07.2021, 20:17
  • Third Floppy Drive ? Twenty Six Drives ? - mceric, 16.07.2021, 20:43
  • Third Floppy Drive ? Twenty Six Drives ? - bretjohn, 16.07.2021, 22:01
    • Third Floppy Drive ? Twenty Six Drives ? - Rugxulo, 17.07.2021, 00:15