Originally posted by: PowerEngineerMy main gripe with the default lettering is ...
I have so many gripes with MS on this score...
There was no reason for MS to adopt this scheme. ALL partitions that are valid in DOS/Windows and are on a particular drive should be in sequential order. ALL the partitions on the first drive should be before all the partitions on the second. That is the ONLY scheme that makes sense.
As a background, HDs used to be tremendously expensive, not $100. In the era of first IBM PC, you could buy a Volkswagen, or a 15 Megabyte (not Giga) HD, take your pick. It was considered astounding that the price of HDs had dropped that low. 15 Megabytes was so unimaginably huge that no individual or small business could conceivable make use of the whole thing. Therefore, putting two OS's on a HD was an intriguing way to utilize your investment.
To go into a little history, as far as I know it, the "four primary partitions" standard goes way, way back, and MS just followed it. That meant that DOS could be put on the same HD as, say, UNIX. Each primary partition has a number in the table indicating which OS it is. DOS has its own number, various UNIXes have their own number, etc. The idea was that each OS would be isolated and distinct from one another. At a certain point, the common HDs outgrew the first DOS file system size limit. MS came up with the idea of using another of the primary partitions and designating it with a new OS number. That is what we now call an extended partition. MS also created a scheme to subdivide (partition) the extended partition, a completely different scheme that can have any number of partitions. We call these subdivisions "logical" partitions. Each partition would be treated like a new HD, so now the old file system would work just fine provided we partitioned the whole HD down small enough. Eventually HDs became so large that the number of partitions got out of hand, and MS created a new file system that is semi-compatible with the earlier system, but the size of the partitions can be tremendously larger. At no point was it ever necessary for MS to jumble up the DOS partitions on one HD with those on another. And even if there were some reason, they should have put it right long ago.
The "four primary partitions" standard has something designating which partition is "active". The idea is that you can then have an automatic system for booting an OS. Each partition has a designated area for a short boot program that can ultimately load the whole OS. In fact the BIOS in each IBM PC compatible does this; it normally reads the boot program on the "active" partition into memory and proceeds to execute it. You are only supposed to have one partition active on only one drive, but the BIOS boots the first one it finds, so it doesn't hurt anything if two drives have active partitions.
Linux users are familiar with the idea that you can put a program on a boot floppy which then boots a HD partition, the Linux partition let's say, which might not be marked active. Of course you can! There are also various ways a "boot manager" program can be put on a HD, which the BIOS boots as if it were an OS, after which this boot manager can do just about anything, but it generally will boot different partitions, including logical partitions within the extended partition.
Back to gripes. So Windows/DOS has this arcane system of treating partitions as if they were HDs which MS is perversely committed to. To straighten this out, they could have done what had already been done by others long before MS bought Seattle PC-DOS from the remarkable man that cloned CP/M, and began the gradual transformation into the convoluted absurdity we know, or remember, as DOS, and which became exponentially more grotesque as it metastasized into Windows. They could have "handles" which are translate into drives; a name which can be assigned to any drive. Within the Windows API, all file access would be done with the handle (instead of a drive letter) as the starting point. Then if the drive letters are scrambled, the handles would be reassigned so that they designated the right drive. Simple. Easy. Simple and easy are concepts which not only have no appeal to Billion Gates, but for which he is cognitively disabled. He can't recognize it when he sees it. The price of genius I guess.
But we now have NT being merged into the consumer-oriented Windows XP. XP/NT fixes everything. NT was once sidetracked into a professional/commercial OS a few years after Windows 95 hit the stores, because it was unrealistic to require home users to buy the expensive chunk of memory that NT would need to run, 16 Megabytes. Remarkable strides have been made since, and NT has been slimmed down so it will now run comfortably in 256 Megabytes. IAC, I decided to add a boot for XP to my system, in addition to my working boot of Win98se, just to check out XP. I went along blithely with the recommendation that NTFS was the true file system that XP should properly be run on, and allowed the XP partition to be formatted as NTFS. At last I would see what the all-poweful, all-knowing NTFS would do. But Win98 does not think NTFS is valid, so many drive letters were lowered, and 90% of my programs would need be redone if they were to work.
I wonder what it is about NTFS that makes it so impossible to run on Win98se? I have been given to understand that 98 has "installable file systems" (IFS) built in, and that CDs and network drives are made to work by this method.
Actually all Win98se would have to do is advance one letter when it saw an NTFS without assigning a letter to it. Simple. Easy. Not Gatesean.
Getting back to letters; if anyone remembers compressed drives, they could be reassigned back to their original drive letter so that even drive C:, the boot drive, was switched back to letter C after it was compressed. So Win98se evidently has this capability of reassigning drive letters built in somewhere. Why is MS keeping the secret from us? Do they hate us that much?
To sum up, MS could readily and simply solve our drive letter problems. They didn't have to cause the problem in the first place. But they don't give a s**t.
Facebook
Twitter