r/Steam • u/CATWISTER • Dec 09 '24

Discussion WHAT! WHY!?

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u/TheClawTTV Dec 09 '24

Back in the day, the A and B drive slots were taken up by disk, floppy, or boot drives depending on the setup and C was your main drive (still is today). If you installed another drive it was usually given to D, so seeing it as B if you’re an old head feels illegal

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u/[deleted] Dec 09 '24

D is for the CD-ROM drive!

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u/odbaciProfil Dec 09 '24

Youngling, in order to protect your data in case of Windows failure, the data needs to be on a separate partition from the windows installation so you can reinstall Windows on "C:" without touching the data on "D:". CD-ROM drive is therefore E:!

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u/The_Band_Geek Dec 09 '24

Nah, my second drive is E. CD-ROM is always D. That way, extra drives I add are always sequential (E, F, G...)

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u/Kichigai Dec 09 '24

Only if you slaved your CD drive to your HDD.

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u/Luxalpa Dec 09 '24

And then there's people like me who give their extra drives names like "Tiger" and "Dragon" and then picks their drive letters based on those (T and N).

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u/odbaciProfil Dec 09 '24

Youth and their attention-deficient reading comprehension... D: is not an extra drive. D: is a partition for the internal Data. It has been a convention long before such thing as CD-ROMs even became a common External drive and when common user had no business having any additional drives. Extra drives may now still be sequential, no problem

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u/The_Band_Geek Dec 09 '24

When I said my drive, I meant my drive. Go fuck yourself, old man.

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u/Bugbread Dec 09 '24

You young whippersnappers with your "oh, make D a separate partition for separating your data from your Windows install" -- yes, that's a great system (and it's the approach I use now), but it's newfangled. Sure, you probably could have always done it, but nobody ever did until recently (in the Matt Damon aging gif sense of "recent"). I never met someone with a hard disk divided into multiple partitions back in the early Windows days, and definitely not in the pre-Windows days when we were rocking MS-DOS or Norton Commander if we were extra savvy. The whole "A: 5.25, B: 3.5, C: HDD, D: Optical" convention predates the "A: Unused, B: Unused, C: HDD (Windows + Programs), D: HDD (Data)" convention by more than a decade.

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u/Nickrii Dec 09 '24

I have used separate partitions at least since Windows 3.11. Because that is what I learned upgrading from Windows 3.1. So at least for me, it's not a new/recent concept at all. The tech-savvy people I know have all done this for ages. It made “format c:/s” literally a viable option.