Why C:?

Why do disk letters start with C:?

When my nephew asked me this he was 20 years old and I knew I was getting old. In the late days of floppy disks the first 2 drives were always the (removable) disk drives A & B. Only later computers started to get hard disk drives that were built into the machines and as such they got the next letter: C.

A long time ago on Windows it could even generate issues if you would assign custom drives to the letters A: and B: because Windows still expected floppy drives there.

Often you would end up partitioning a hard disk having the Windows operating system partition on C:, the optical drive on D: and then multiple partitions more on letters later in the alphabet.

These days are gone. At least I got accustomed to put the optical drive on A: and an external hard disk on B:. The hard disk partitions start at C: and go throughout the letters in a more logical fashion.

(and today you usually anyways just have one optical drive, not a dedicated CD-ROM drive and a CD-Burner... but that's another old man's anecdote ;)

Note, that you will likely have a disk drive in most virtual machines that is very likely not needed. Just start the machine without that drive A: connected and re-assign it to the (more useful) optical drive.

Keywords:
Windows, Disk Management

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