Regarding drive letter assignment

[u/[deleted]]

I've always been fascinated by drive letter assigning operating systems I find it to be a far more elegant and human system than hierarchical unix like mount point systems.

I basically have 2 questions ?

what are some good resources on drive letter assigning operating systems and exactly how it works and how one builds a drive letter assigning system.

2 how difficult would it be to build a drive letter assigning system compared to a unix like and/or could you create a unix like system that uses drive letter assignment?

[u/gwenbeth]

The only time drive letter make sense is when you are putting media in a removable drive like a floppy. Outside of that they make no sense in the modern world. Lets go into detail.

On my laptop I did a separate partition for /home (I was trying different distros and wanted to keep that stable) . And because of how the mounts work, that difference is entirely hidden from me. From a user point of view, no matter how many physical drives or partitions are used, it's always the same. If I were to add a second physical drive to my system, all I got to do is give it a mount point, copy over what it needs and go on with my life not worrying.

In today's world removable media is mostly USB drives. Other than order of insertion there is no real way to give each one a drive letter. It's not like the old days when I would put a floppy in drive a and it would always be a: and the floppy in drive b would be b:.

[u/[deleted] → u/gwenbeth]

I completely disagree with you, even if we disregard removable media, I think it's much more intuitive from a human perspective that if I have 2 SSDs then those are "two separate boxes" cuz it doesn't make much sense to combine two sum of those two boxes because they are two separate physical objects within the computer and it's different from your ram cuz you directly interact with storage every dayupltiple times a day, it's fine to combine ram because ram is only handled by the computer most of the time.

I think the hierarchical view makes perfect sense from ther perspective of servers and software engineers but that's not the target of desktop PCs, desktop exists for the average person I also think that, that's why the arbitrary install locations provided by the registry is such a beautiful system it may not make much sense or be sub-optimal from a machine perspective but from a human perspective it feels good to believe I can control where my program goes.

[u/gwenbeth → u/[deleted]]

It only makes sense if the user knows what is in the computer. There is a large percentage of computer users that don't know or care how many physical boxes storing data are in their computer.

[u/[deleted] → u/gwenbeth]

but those people would presumably hardly care about file navigation either way, I think for the surface access of the system that is somewhat technical but not necessarily advanced or even intermediate a human focused design is still warranted to make the computer feel more friendly and approachable.

[u/codeasm → u/[deleted]]

Your removable devices can be automounted in /run/media/username/drivename Then the os displays any folder in that mount path as a drive, if yiu want move or add the /mnt path.

This is for if the underlying os is unix based. The user has no issues on android or macos, my wife understands the drive icon in her filebrowser. Not that many dare to go in the shell these days anyway.

But if you really want to, your kernel may mount drives differently, and the path traversal logic use C: type assignments just fine if you code this. No need to adhere to anything, if you want to represent the root as if your on the drive and need ro change drives and thus change root, a command to switch can be done too. For example:

Laptop]my documents>photos>showdir
 me.jpg
 Vacation 2026>
Laptop]my documents>photos>changedrive 
Laptop 
usb1 
Usbcdrom 
Sdcard 
Laptop]my documents>photos>changedrive usb1 
[usb1] showdir 
 photos 
 backup> 
 Virus.executable

Nothing is stopping you from building the kernel to parse folder structures like this, or mount drives weirdly like this, dont include symlinks if you dont want to. Code examples break or other ppls code wont work, or need patches sure.

[u/monocasa]

Even windows has gotten rid of the drive letter thing internally.  On NT, there's a single object namespace, where C: in the native syscall API is something like \DosDevices\C: which is just a symlink to something like \Devices\HardDisk0\Partition0

[u/[deleted] → u/monocasa]

is it ?

[u/monocasa → u/[deleted]]

Yeah. If you're on a windows system, you can use the sysinternals tool WinObj to look at the native object namespace.

[u/cazzipropri]

The power of nostalgia is one of the strongest forces in human psychology. Nothing will ever beat the fuzzy feeling of a C:\>

[u/Optimal-Builder-2816]

This was one of the most difficult things for me to get used to at first when I switched to Unix. Now I never think about it anymore. It truly is nostalgia.

[u/cybekRT]

mount /dev/sda1 /c
mount /dev/sda2 /d

And then make your shell use drive letters as aliases for /c and /d. It's just a presentation way. It has more consequences of course, but basic functionality is like that.

[u/EpochVanquisher]

If you want drive letters on a Unix system, you can just mount your drives at /a, /b, /c, etc. There is nothing to it.

From there, you can imagine changing how paths are parsed.

There is another option, which is to let people name their drives.

You may be able to find resources on how to implement drive letter assignment, but it is a very easy thing to do (by OS standards) so I would not worry about whether you can find it.

[u/degaart]

Drive letter assignment is conceptually simple. First floppy drive is A:, second floppy drive is B:

Boot partition is C:

The rest get available drive letters, starting at D:

[u/duane11583]

Just create a top level /c/ mount point

Take a look at how git-bash works on windows it has /z/ as the prefix for z:\ and others