Comments on: Kissing off floppies?

Question: Kissing off floppies?

voidcontext — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:07:36 -0800

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.

By: knave

knave — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:16:10 -0800

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.

By: voidcontext

voidcontext — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:22:16 -0800

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?

By: voidcontext

voidcontext — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:23:35 -0800

Sweet, I just looked it up. I can use a path. Knave, thanks!

By: jellicle

jellicle — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:26:07 -0800

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.

By: voidcontext

voidcontext — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:33:30 -0800

It doesn't look like assign is available on Windows 2000.

By: ed\26h

ed\26h — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:00:08 -0800

Could also do:

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

To automatically reconnect your drive substitution at logon.

By: chuma

chuma — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:15:11 -0800

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".

By: ed\26h

ed\26h — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:39:18 -0800

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.)

By: voidcontext

voidcontext — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 10:09:37 -0800

'subst' and 'net use', both worked. Disk management did not, but possibly would have with registry hacks.

By: Mitheral

Mitheral — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 15:00:21 -0800

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.