Kissing off floppies?

January 16, 2006 8:07 AM

How do I get something other then a floppy drive to show up as the a: drive in Windows 2000? It could be a USB jump drive or a mapped drive, it doesn't matter so long as it's not a floppy. I have an old legacy application that only loads its data from a:, and it's driving me insane keeping stacks of floppies around.
posted by voidcontext to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Best answer: If you can physically remove the floppy drive, then you could do a subst command at the command line to map another drive to A:. Might even be simpler to disable the floppy drive through BIOS. I haven't tried this myself, but Windows let me do:

subst b: c:\

So I assume it'll work for A: if there's no A drive.
posted by knave at 8:16 AM on January 16, 2006

Response by poster: When you subst'd c: for b:, do you still have access to c: as c:? Does subst work only at the drive level or can it do folders?
posted by voidcontext at 8:22 AM on January 16, 2006

Response by poster: Sweet, I just looked it up. I can use a path. Knave, thanks!
posted by voidcontext at 8:23 AM on January 16, 2006

The assign command is what you actually want. You can assign a: to your USB drive, whatever letter it actually is. You don't need to remove your floppy drive (though if you assign away its drive letter, you won't be able to access it).

subst would also work.
posted by jellicle at 8:26 AM on January 16, 2006

Response by poster: It doesn't look like assign is available on Windows 2000.
posted by voidcontext at 8:33 AM on January 16, 2006

Best answer: Could also do:

net use a: \\127.0.0.1\c$ /persistent:yes

To automatically reconnect your drive substitution at logon.
posted by ed\26h at 9:00 AM on January 16, 2006

jellicle, on Win2k and later you can use the Disk Management snap-in (under Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management, then under the Storage section) to map any non-floppy drive to any drive letter.

Simply right-click the disk you want to modify and choose "Change Drive Letter and Path".
posted by chuma at 9:15 AM on January 16, 2006

I don't think you can map drives to letters A or B using Disk Management? (I had a cursory look before my last post.)
posted by ed\26h at 9:39 AM on January 16, 2006

Response by poster: 'subst' and 'net use', both worked. Disk management did not, but possibly would have with registry hacks.
posted by voidcontext at 10:09 AM on January 16, 2006

ed\26h writes "net use a: \\127.0.0.1\c$ /persistent:yes

"To automatically reconnect your drive substitution at logon."

This won't work if you have a physical A: already in the machine. The reconnect function checks to see if the drive letter is already in use, sees that it is, and then doesn't map the drive. We see this all the time with the proliferation of those 14-in-1 card readers. The user will hook one up, it'll grab drive letters E:\ thru K:\ and bingo, no home drive (H:\) the next time they login.
posted by Mitheral at 3:00 PM on January 17, 2006