How come you never see drive "B" on a computer. It always drive "A", "C" etc....

Question

How come you never see drive "B" on a computer. It always drive "A", "C" etc....

Answer 1

I can tell you how to make a drive b if it makes you feel any better

Answer 2

Once upon a time, long long ago, on an operating system far far away (try early 70's and MS-DOS) computers did not have hard drives. They had two floppy drives. One for running the program, the other for saving data. They were the "A" and "B" drive.



When the hard drive was invented, it was attached to the system board by a different cable, on a different type of controller. So it was assigned as the "C" drive. Everything after that was D,E,F, etc.



If you were to add a second floppy drive to you PC, it would be the "B" drive. They just never bothered to re-write DOS and Windows to get that letter back again.



(Oh...and TV stations start with channel 2 because in the 50's the FCC took away channel 1 and divided it up for police, fire and ambulance radio channels)

Answer 3

It is a legacy feature. When computers first came out, the only removable media were floppy disks. In order to boot the computer, you needed to use two floppy disks at the same time - floppy disks only hold 1.44 MB per disk. That being the case, computer engineers decided to reserve drives A and B for the two floppy disks. The local drive was named C, the next letter in the alphabet. Obviously, computers have advance so there is no longer a need for the floppy disks but the naming system remains.

Answer 4

In the old days, PCs only had a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. That was called drive A



Better machines had two floppy drives, Drive A and drive B.



Real expensive machines had a hard disk, Drive C.



Nowadays no-one has 2 floppy frives, but the convention of calling the first hard drive c: has stuck.

Answer 5

A: and B: drives were used as designations for the removable floppy drives on earlier computers, when they had 2 floppy drives. Now those are going the way of the dinosaur, and you get the C: drive for the hard drive, maybe the D: for the CD drive, and whatever else you map to a letter designation.

Answer 6

Drive B, as many others answered, is for a second floppy disk drive. The second drive was not merely for convenience but was also necessary in order to copy diskettes. In the early days, systems that used diskettes did not have enough memory to read and store a diskette and then write to a blank newly-inserted diskette. Even mainframes copied platters using two drives.

In the late 1970's, I worked for NCR Corporation, and we used a unit with two 8-inch floppy drives. Copying a diskette took about 12 minutes, as I recall. That might seem seem archaic now, but it was a big step forward from punched paper tape, punched cards, and reels of tape. I can't remember the storage capacity of an 8-inch diskette, but I believe it might have been only several K.

Answer 7

Before the advent of the hard drive, computers typically had two floppy disk drives, labeled A and B. When hard disks were invented, they were given the letter C



The concept of drive letters might have originated in the CP/M operating system, in imitation of the device prefixes in the RSX-11 and VMS operating systems. However, IBM's VM/CMS, an even earlier operating system, also had drive letters, identifying minidisks attached to a user session; a full pathname would be composed of a filename, filetype and disk letter called filemode.



Unlike the concept of mount points, where the user can create directories of arbitrary name and content in the root namespace, drive letter assignment implies that only letters are in this namespace, and they represent solely volumes. In other words, it is a process of naming the roots of the "forest" that represents the file system (with each volume being an independent tree therein).



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



Assign the drive letter 'A' to the boot floppy, and 'B' to the secondary floppy.

Assign a drive letter, beginning with 'C' to the first active primary partition recognized upon the first physical hard disk.

Assign subsequent drive letters to the first primary partition upon each successive physical hard disk drive, if present within the system.

Assign subsequent drive letters to every recognized logical partition, beginning with the first hard drive and proceeding through successive physical hard disk drives, if present within the system.

Assign subsequent drive letters to any additional floppy, CD/DVD drives.

Answer 8

Years ago when pc's had both a 3.5" floppy drive, and a 5.25" floppy disc drive, the latter was the B drive. I don't know of any pc's manufactured nowadays that have a 5.25" drive, so that letter "B" was dropped. See the below link for an explanation.

Answer 9

Drive B is normally reserved for a second floppy drive. Because there is no real need for two floppy drives on one system, this why you never see drive B.

Answer 10

The slot "Drive B" is being reserved, and has actually been copywrited by Bill Gates so no one can use it. It is being reserved for a insertable virtual drive that is being developed by Microsoft and will revolutionize the computer world as we know it. This drive will allow users to plug in, turn on, and operate your specific computer from anywhere in the world. It only becomes operational when you plug the transmitter directly into the back of your neck and spinal column. It is tentatively going to be named the "B-atrix" drive but that may be subject to change. Thanks for asking.

Answer 11

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Answer 12

'B' was the conventional designation for the second floppy disk. When was the last time you saw a computer with ONE floppy disk, let alone 2?



Now the real question is why do TV stations start with channel 2....?

Answer 13

i think its because back in the old days there used to be 2 floppy drives one was for the one we use to day and one was for a bigger one. that one used to be B. when they stopped using it they just kept it at A-floppy c-hard drive d-cd rom

hope that helps

Answer 14

Since floppies are bsically dead I think they should just make the cdrom the A: drive now

Answer 15

because the B drive is used for the 5.5 inch floppy's. there is a way that u are able to set each drive letter. you have to goto msconfig or something..