6 ms·

Windows drive letters are ridiculous. Use an external drive for e.g. video editing, its letter can be stolen by another drive, you can’t work anymore.

by rado 10mo ago

TazeTSchnitzel 10mo ago
You can fix the drive letter assignments at any time if they become a problem, or use a directory as a mount point if that's less troublesome. (Win-R, diskmgmt.msc)
Arainach 10mo ago
Not while it's mounted. This is akin to complaining that on Linux if you unplug a flash drive and plug in a different one that second drive could "steal" /mnt/sdb1 or whatever.
- Filligree 10mo ago
  People did complain about that, which is why on Linux today that mount would use the disk UUID or label instead. So it’s fixed. What’s windows’ excuse? :-)
  - ChrisSD 10mo ago
    Windows also has uuids. E.g.: \\.\Volume{3558506b-6ae4-11eb-8698-806e6f6e6963}\
    - Someone1234 10mo ago
      Which can be trivially mapped to directories for aliasing. Just like Linux. Windows NT and UNIX are much more similar than many people realize; Windows NT just has a giant pile of Dos/Win9x compatibility baked on top hiding how great the core kernel design actually is. I think this article demonstrates that very well.
      - jug 10mo ago
        Yeah, NTFS is quite capable. I mostly blame the Windows UI for being a bit too dumbed down and not advertising the capabilities well.
      - anthk 10mo ago
        In the end, if you think about it, the Win32 subsystem running on top of NT OSes it's pretty much the same concept as Wine running on Unix. That's why Wine is not an emulator. And neither is XP emulating old Win32 stuff to run Win9x binaries.
- hulitu 10mo ago
  Linux is broken from this point of view. Inserting an USB drive before boot breaks booting .
  - Xiol 10mo ago
    Certainly doesn't for me. Skill issue.
    - dpark 10mo ago
      “Works on my machine” is rarely a helpful response. Doubling down with the “skill issue” insult makes it rude in addition to being unhelpful. Two other people were able to concisely explain the problem instead of being rude and condescending.
  - oasisaimlessly 10mo ago
    Only if you have a broken kernel cmdline or fstab that references /dev/sd* instead of using the UUID=xyz or /dev/disk/by-id/xyz syntax.
    - cesarb 10mo ago
      > Only if you have an old-style kernel cmdline or fstab that references /dev/sd* instead of using the UUID=xyz or /dev/disk/by-id/xyz syntax. Fixed that for you. It used to be normal to use the device path (/dev/hd* or /dev/sd*) to reference the filesystem partitions. Using the UUID or the by-id symlink instead is a novelty, introduced precisely to fix these device enumeration order issues.
      - creatonez 10mo ago
        Yes... things were certainly broken in the distant past
  - lutusp 10mo ago
    > [ .. ] Inserting an USB drive before boot breaks booting. Only if the machine's BIOS is configured to give bootable USB devices boot-order priority. So it's not about Linux -- in fact, the same thing would happen on a Windows machine. Remember that in a properly configured Linux install, the boot partition is identified by UUID, not hardware identifier (in /etc/fstab). Consequently if you change a drive's hardware connection point, the system still boots.
avhception 10mo ago
I remember vividly when a user couldn't access his smb drive from Windows because both his printer and also the computer's case came with one of these multi-cardreaders with n slots and the drive letters collided. That's when I learned that smb drive letters don't even come from the "global" pool of drive letters, because, and this is obvious in hindsight, they are a per-user affair (credentials and all that). I think the concept of drive letters is flawed.
- mrweasel 10mo ago
  Even Microsoft appears to agree with you, given that drive letters are symlinks. It's basically legacy, there's just no plan or reasonable path forward that will remove them.
- p_ing 10mo ago
  I always tried to point people to DFS w/ the FQDN path. We added a shortcut to the user's desktop that pointed to their home folder on the DFS namespace.
- bluGill 10mo ago
  Drive letters made sense in 1981 for personal computers. Of course a network run by IT isn't personal anymore - by definition.
p_l 10mo ago
Only if the actual "drive letter" assigned to the drive is the special value for "auto". Otherwise, the drive letter is allocated statically and won't be used by another volume.
leptons 10mo ago
You can't work anymore only if you are incurious and unable to google a simple solution - assign a different drive letter with the disk management program.
Kwpolska 10mo ago
If you go with the defaults, they might be. But if you manually define the letter for your external drive, it will keep it forever. (I have my external drive set to X. I’m not sure if Windows would respect that assignment if I had plugged in 19 other drives, but that is never going to happen.)

Windows drive letters are ridiculous. Use an external drive for e.g. video editing, its letter can be stolen by another drive, you can’t work anymore.

by rado 10mo ago

Windows drive letters are ridiculous. Use an external drive for e.g. video editing, its letter can be stolen by another drive, you can’t work anymore.

TazeTSchnitzel 10mo ago

You can fix the drive letter assignments at any time if they become a problem, or use a directory as a mount point if that's less troublesome. (Win-R, diskmgmt.msc)

Arainach 10mo ago

Not while it's mounted. This is akin to complaining that on Linux if you unplug a flash drive and plug in a different one that second drive could "steal" /mnt/sdb1 or whatever.

Filligree 10mo ago
People did complain about that, which is why on Linux today that mount would use the disk UUID or label instead. So it’s fixed. What’s windows’ excuse? :-)
- ChrisSD 10mo ago
  Windows also has uuids. E.g.: \\.\Volume{3558506b-6ae4-11eb-8698-806e6f6e6963}\
  - Someone1234 10mo ago
    Which can be trivially mapped to directories for aliasing. Just like Linux. Windows NT and UNIX are much more similar than many people realize; Windows NT just has a giant pile of Dos/Win9x compatibility baked on top hiding how great the core kernel design actually is. I think this article demonstrates that very well.
    - jug 10mo ago
      Yeah, NTFS is quite capable. I mostly blame the Windows UI for being a bit too dumbed down and not advertising the capabilities well.
    - anthk 10mo ago
      In the end, if you think about it, the Win32 subsystem running on top of NT OSes it's pretty much the same concept as Wine running on Unix. That's why Wine is not an emulator. And neither is XP emulating old Win32 stuff to run Win9x binaries.
hulitu 10mo ago
Linux is broken from this point of view. Inserting an USB drive before boot breaks booting .
- Xiol 10mo ago
  Certainly doesn't for me. Skill issue.
  - dpark 10mo ago
    “Works on my machine” is rarely a helpful response. Doubling down with the “skill issue” insult makes it rude in addition to being unhelpful. Two other people were able to concisely explain the problem instead of being rude and condescending.
- oasisaimlessly 10mo ago
  Only if you have a broken kernel cmdline or fstab that references /dev/sd* instead of using the UUID=xyz or /dev/disk/by-id/xyz syntax.
  - cesarb 10mo ago
    > Only if you have an old-style kernel cmdline or fstab that references /dev/sd* instead of using the UUID=xyz or /dev/disk/by-id/xyz syntax. Fixed that for you. It used to be normal to use the device path (/dev/hd* or /dev/sd*) to reference the filesystem partitions. Using the UUID or the by-id symlink instead is a novelty, introduced precisely to fix these device enumeration order issues.
    - creatonez 10mo ago
      Yes... things were certainly broken in the distant past
- lutusp 10mo ago
  > [ .. ] Inserting an USB drive before boot breaks booting. Only if the machine's BIOS is configured to give bootable USB devices boot-order priority. So it's not about Linux -- in fact, the same thing would happen on a Windows machine. Remember that in a properly configured Linux install, the boot partition is identified by UUID, not hardware identifier (in /etc/fstab). Consequently if you change a drive's hardware connection point, the system still boots.

avhception 10mo ago

I remember vividly when a user couldn't access his smb drive from Windows because both his printer and also the computer's case came with one of these multi-cardreaders with n slots and the drive letters collided. That's when I learned that smb drive letters don't even come from the "global" pool of drive letters, because, and this is obvious in hindsight, they are a per-user affair (credentials and all that). I think the concept of drive letters is flawed.

mrweasel 10mo ago
Even Microsoft appears to agree with you, given that drive letters are symlinks. It's basically legacy, there's just no plan or reasonable path forward that will remove them.
p_ing 10mo ago
I always tried to point people to DFS w/ the FQDN path. We added a shortcut to the user's desktop that pointed to their home folder on the DFS namespace.
bluGill 10mo ago
Drive letters made sense in 1981 for personal computers. Of course a network run by IT isn't personal anymore - by definition.

p_l 10mo ago

Only if the actual "drive letter" assigned to the drive is the special value for "auto". Otherwise, the drive letter is allocated statically and won't be used by another volume.

leptons 10mo ago

You can't work anymore only if you are incurious and unable to google a simple solution - assign a different drive letter with the disk management program.

Kwpolska 10mo ago

If you go with the defaults, they might be. But if you manually define the letter for your external drive, it will keep it forever. (I have my external drive set to X. I’m not sure if Windows would respect that assignment if I had plugged in 19 other drives, but that is never going to happen.)