Drive letter assignment

In computing, drive letter assignment is the process of assigning alphabetical identifiers to volumes. Unlike the concept of UNIX mount points, where volumes are named and located arbitrarily in a single hierarchical namespace, drive letter assignment allows multiple highest-level namespaces. Drive letter assignment is thus a process of using letters to name the roots of the "forest" representing the file system; each volume holds an independent "tree" (or, for non-hierarchical file systems, an independent list of files).

The concept of drive letters, as used today, presumably owes its origins to IBM's VM family of operating systems, dating back to CP/CMS in 1967 (and its research predecessor CP-40), by way of Digital Research's (DRI) CP/M. The concept evolved through several steps:

The important capability of hierarchical directories within each drive letter was initially absent from these systems. This was a major feature of UNIX and other similar operating systems, where hard disk drives held thousands (rather than tens or hundreds) of files. Increasing microcomputer storage capacities led to their introduction, eventually followed by long filenames. In file systems lacking such naming mechanisms, drive letter assignment proved a useful, simple organizing principle.

Except for CP/M and versions of MS-DOS/PC DOS prior to version 5.0, each of these operating systems assigns drive letters according to the following algorithm:

MS-DOS/PC DOS versions 4.0 and earlier assign letters to all of the floppy drives before considering hard drives, so a system with four floppy drives would call the first hard drive E:. Starting with DOS 5.0, the system ensures that drive C: is always a hard disk, even if the system has more than two physical floppy drives.

While without deliberate remapping, the drive letter assignments are typically fixed until the next reboot, however, Zenith MS-DOS 3.21 will update the drive letter assignments when resetting a drive. This may cause drive letters to change without reboot if the partitioning of the harddisk was changed.

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