Have you seen systems where the system hard disk wasn't drive C?

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GreyBeardIT@reddit

Not much these days, but it was an issue that could occur if you performed an OS upgrade with a specific version of Windows. I do know of a site, right now, that maps the B: drive to a network share and that just makes me cringe. A:/B: ARE RESERVED.. I mean, they aren't anymore, but for a very long time, they were wholly reserved and this mapping drives me nuts.. lol Greybeard things, I guess.

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mjcl@reddit

This is sort of "back in the day", but I remember having Citrix MetaFrame (1.8 era) remote desktop servers with the boot drive being something like R: or S:. The reason was to leave "C:" available for mapping to the ICA client's C drive. Mostly I remember it caused weird problems with various things that made assumptions about C being the boot disk.

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ample_space@reddit

N:

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thereisaplace_@reddit

LOL… that brought back painful memories. It was even worse when it ran on OS/2 (sheesh I’m old).

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No_Nature_3133@reddit

MetaFrame ran on os/2?!

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pdp10@reddit

Citrix believed Microsoft when Microsoft said that Microsoft and IBM's OS/2 operating system was the future. That wasn't the worst stab in the back, though. Citrix made NT into a competitive multiuser operating system that could [almost compete with Unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1#Development_history), and their business partner [stole it along with the revenue.](https://redcircle.blog/2006/10/15/citrix-and-microsoft-1989-1998/)

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segagamer@reddit

Do you have anything between 1997 and 2024 where four game studios in poor health releasing poorly selling games were shut down after multiple attempts to succeed?

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pdp10@reddit

Well there was that time in between when Microsoft was ruled to be an illegal monopoly because they used their client OS leverage to put Netscape out of business.

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segagamer@reddit

Because Netscape wanted people to buy Web browsers? I'm on Microsoft's side here.

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mjcl@reddit

It was called [Citrix Multiuser](https://winworldpc.com/product/citrix-multiuser/10).

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Sagail@reddit

Fucking os/2 a friend of mine fell asleep inserting floppies at night once during an installation

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KStieers@reddit

Metaframe until Presentation Server I think? We had issues with hard coded installs to C:...

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ohfucknotthisagain@reddit

It's definitely still a thing. If you manually partition during Windows setup, you can do this any time you want. I'm not aware of any OEMs that ship systems that way, if that's what you mean.

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Ok_Exchange_9646@reddit (OP)

I always use autounattend.xml

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looneybooms@reddit

not often, however, why should that matter? system variables exist so that there is no reason to make assumptions.

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OsmiumBalloon@reddit

> system variables exist so that there is no reason to make assumptions. Bad code often makes bad assumptions. That includes code from Microsoft. Even code that comes with Windows, sometimes.

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sobrique@reddit

I mean, it _shouldn't_ matter. But I have been a sysadmin long enough to know that in reality anything even slightly unusual will break sooner or later due to some bad code assumptions.

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Maelefique@reddit

Bingo... nothing is foolproof... we have a nasty habit of inventing better fools instead. :)

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Mystery_Stone@reddit

Yes, it's when an endpoint is PXE'd and the presevedriveletter hasn't been used and set to false. This then retains the drive letter used by the task sequence when formatting then drive, usually D: Adding the task sequence step with the task sequence variable PreserveDriveletter = false removes the drive letter used when formatting the partition.

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SteveSyfuhs@reddit

Sure, happens somewhat regularly. For instance for some Azure services, they deploy the OS to non-C: drives. You can see it if you ever find yourself RDPing into the ones where you own the VM. Why? Makes it easier to detect when system things accidentally assume C:, and to prevent apps from innapropriately taking dependencies on system drives that might drop out from under you. Also makes it easier to deploy apps that assume they're running from C:, etc.

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grumpyolddude@reddit

Sure. Some of the first IBM PCs had only floppy disks, usually 2, and the boot drive was A: That disk stayed in for the os, and the other drive (B:) held applications or data. When hard disks were added in this configuration the drive letter for the first drive/partition was C: and it was much more convenient and faster to put the OS there than on a floppy. A floppy had only about 160K of space while the hard drive had 10 Megabytes. Anyway, On any modern PC when you install a windows OS you can choose what disk and partition you install it to. C: is by far the most common, but D, E, F any letter really could be assigned to the boot drive as long as the underlying system could boot from it. It's not exactly common, but wasn't too unusual to sometimes install from CD and have the system assign the CD drive the C letter and the first hard drive D and you'd end up with a PC that ran from D or something else.

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-SPOF@reddit

>the boot drive was A I remember that time. For the new generation, it might seem odd not having A and B drives.

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alvanson@reddit

It's the channel 1 of their generation

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mattl1698@reddit

is that an American thing?

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_XNine_@reddit

Tvs with analog buttons didn't have a station 1. They started with 2. My parents had a TV with capacitive buttons you had to touch to turn the channel. No remote.

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pdp10@reddit

> No remote. Most televisions had notched dials. The first remote controls weren't electronic -- [many weren't even *electric*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_control#Television_remote_controls): > In 1956, Robert Adler developed Zenith Space Command, a wireless remote. It was mechanical and used ultrasound to change the channel and volume. When the user pushed a button on the remote control, it struck a bar and clicked, hence they were commonly called "clickers", and the mechanics were similar to a pluck. Each of the four bars emitted a different fundamental frequency with ultrasonic harmonics, and circuits in the television detected these sounds and interpreted them as channel-up, channel-down, sound-on/off, and power-on/off.

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pdp10@reddit

[Yes, but only from 1946 to 1948.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_1_$North_American_TV$)

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Dje4321@reddit

Probably yeah. Most Output devices would always choose either Channel 3/4

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Lemonwater925@reddit

lol. Was my very first thought.

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Dje4321@reddit

The only issue with this is some applications expect C: to the primary OS drive and refuse to install on anything else. Ive ran into this a few times when I had a tiny NVME OS drive and a massive hard drive to install everything else too. Either had to extract the applications contents from the installer and manually set it up on the D: drive, or make enough room on the OS drive to get the installation to proceed, and just move it over to the drive later.

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grumpyolddude@reddit

That's really poor (hard)coding on the part of the developer. Environment variables like systemdrive, systemroot, windir have been around forever.

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sobrique@reddit

But in fairness, I have been lazy for about as long as that. ;)

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mic_decod@reddit

had this onece on a windows pc with boot drive d. i had do fix it with symlinks on c: to get this software running.

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Ssakaa@reddit

> Not UNIX, Linux, etc. I would be greatly concerned in those cases. Well played cutting the sarcastic jerks off before we got there. > Is this even a thing? I don't know if you can still make it happen with "normal" install circumstances, but it is *entirely* possible to cause. The issue you run into is that *most* things use `$Env:SystemDrive` and `$Env:WinDir`... but not *everything*. More and more, since Windows has gotten less friendly with "customization", I expect to see things hardcode assumptions and break "nonstandard" setups. That disclaimer out of the way, thebest way I've seen it occur is having a clone of a system in the same machine as the origin drive at boot... leading to half the system running from the copy (things that launch from the bootloader directly), and the other half trying to run from the original (things which're referencing C:, which isn't what it just booted from, but get called by path). Even the variables don't really help that much, since the OS itself can't fully make up its mind on which to use. This breaks the system.

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hunterkll@reddit

Around 2014-2015 timeframe, ran into a flawed task sequence for an 8.1 deployment, and the machine would come up installed on the D: drive. There was no C: drive. Never was.

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No_Nature_3133@reddit

Someone actually deployed 8.1?! Those poor souls

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hunterkll@reddit

I was exceedingly happy to be rid of windows 7 at that site. Windows 8 was the first windows 'technically good enough' to break my 2005-2011 non-windows \*nix only "emo phase"

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Ssakaa@reddit

Yep, it's doable. Not trivial, but doable.

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jasutherland@reddit

Dual boot or unusual partitioning could easily put Windows on D or E, and it was certainly possible in the past to rename Program Files to, eg, Programs - and of course the French, German etc versions don’t call it “Program Files”, anyway. You’d often hit badly written programs which just assumed it would always be C:\Program Files though, instead of looking up the correct name/path.

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thenickdude@reddit

Since Windows Vista, the directory isn't actually called e.g. "Gemeinsame Dateien" in German locales, it just appears that way in the UI, it's actually stored as "Program Files" on disk. This is a consequence of allowing the system language to be easily changed in Control Panel without having to install a special single-language localised version of Windows.

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Ssakaa@reddit

Or the assumption that %username% is equal to the name of the profile folder.

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Shadeflayer@reddit

Yea. Novell OS. LoL

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Fallingdamage@reddit

not usually. When I did break-fix work I had seen a couple computers where the owner thought they were cool and edgy by using A: for their primary hard drive. This was in the Windows 95/98 days. It worked but yes, it caused problems.

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ComGuards@reddit

Yes, but not for years now.

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OsmiumBalloon@reddit

I have on very very rare occasions seen recent-ish Windows get confused and mount the system volume on another letter. Only when something else screwy was going on, like playing games with the installer trying to fix something, or swapping disks around between systems, or things like that. Windows did not handle it well. Lots of errors on login, and many things did not work. Not quite totally unusable, though. I can't remember exactly when I last saw this. Might have been Vista, might have been 7. Might even have been XP, although I think I've seen it more on something newer.

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hunterkll@reddit

Had a flawed task sequence one that deployed windows 8.1 onto D: (I didn't make it..... I sure fixed it though). C: never existed. Everything worked fine, it was just a minor annoyance.

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OsmiumBalloon@reddit

I imagine if it happened "on purpose" it would have a better chance of working.

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hotel2oscar@reddit

It's possible and I've been told it's been done but some programs have C:\ hard coded into their programming and throw a fit if the drive isn't C:\

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gsmitheidw1@reddit

I would use the subst command to create a c: that links to d:

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knowsshit@reddit

I used to have another letter than C for the bootdrive in Windows to protect against malware and poorly written software. It was mostly fine. When it wasn't I would use the old subst (substitute) command to temporarily map C: to the system drive if I had to run something that had hardcoded references to C:, but that was very rare for me. The subst command is surprisingly still alive on today's Windows versions.

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Rainmaker526@reddit

I recently was at a customer where they had Windows installed on B:\ on all servers. I was very surprised that it was even possible to use one of those reserved drive letters. I mumbled "well, I guess UEFI changes some other things as well" and went on with my day. It's weird/uncommon, but I know at least one environment that does it...

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danielyelwop@reddit

Yeah, I had to fix that exact problem a couple times when I used to work in education IT support. There are applications that don't like anything other than C Drive.

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HeligKo@reddit

Back in the physical cable position determined the drive assignment days it wasn't uncommon to see the system drive be D: This isn't so much a thing on modern hardware.

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charmingpea@reddit

I've seen a system where the default drive letter for the only HDD was D:, so yes, it's possible. Not common though.

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techb00mer@reddit

Back in the day, sure. Somewhat on topic, we had a young lad setup a few mapped network drives in GP. He had them mapping to A: & B: Those were the days…

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Next_Information_933@reddit

Yep, anything not running windows! Shockingly that world exists

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PTS_Dreaming@reddit

I had a system where the boot drive was 'Sí'.

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alpha417@reddit

Straight to jail.

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Ok-Hunt3000@reddit

No es possibley

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LeakyAssFire@reddit

Once, maybe, about 10 years ago. But, it was a weird request by an eccentric entrepreneur with some trust issues. Not any sort of mature shop.

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trimalchio-worktime@reddit

You can make it whatever you want; whether your boot will get completely mangled by windows updates at some point would be the real question.

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Pancake_Nom@reddit

Plenty of times, back when dual-booting was still a thing,

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woodburyman@reddit

Same was gonna say when Dual Booting was a thing. Also would happen if you imaged a drive to another physical drive, then booted the new drive with the old one attached. Windows would see the UID of the "old" C:\ and keep it C:\ and give the new drive you booted from a new drive assignment. Windows would boot, but boy did services and other software not like paths being completely changed. You'd have to reimage the drive again to have a clean backup. We used to use old Ghost11 to image drives back in 2000/XP days when I worked at a repair shop before we worked on the systems. Sometimes wed reboot but forget to unplug the backup drives and boot order was screwy.

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NeverLookBothWays@reddit

I’ve seen it with transplant PCs where the innards were moved from one to the other…mostly XP era, the system drive would be something like E: It’s just knowing that, makes me never use drive letters for systemroot or program files, but rather I always use the env variables

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joshghz@reddit

In a computer repair store I used to work at, when we built computers with card readers Windows installer would often end up putting it on around G:\. We had a procedure to leave it unplugged until after install. I think this was usually with XP.

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Brett707@reddit

I set a windows boot drive to d and it was such a pain in the ass. Everything wants to install to the C drive so I had to always change it.

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tehkobe@reddit

When I screwed up making an image task sequence in SCCM, yup. I don't even remember how I did it.

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