🚀 go-pugleaf

This isn't directly related to the "third floppy" question, but it may
be informative to people.  (In any case, it is a gripe of mine, and I
haven't flamed anything this year yet, so I'm due.)  The way drive
letters are assigned in DOS is ridiculous.  If you have one hard disk
with partitions C, D, and E on it, then add a second hard disk with 2
partitions on it, the partitions on the second disk become D and F,
and the existing ones on the first disk become C, E, G: it alternates
disks!  (A sensible move would be to make the 2 added ones be F and G,
right?)  Boy would I love to get my hands on whoever figured out that
brain-damaged system: you end up totally messed up trying to remember
what was where.  You're even worse off it the original setup had a
directory in the path of .bat files to invoke stuff on all the other
disks (to keep the length of the PATH short) since you end up editing
all those files.  And then there's the clever software packages which
you installed in directory d:\package (that are now in e:\package)
which notice they aren't in the same directory they were installed in,
so they assume they've been illegally copied and stop working.  Also,
there are packages which contain a .bat file to start themselves up,
and within the .bat file they invoke another executable in the same
directory by the executable's full path name, including drive letter. 
Oh, and don't forget to edit your autoexec.bat, to fix half the env
vars in it that are now wrong, like your TMP vars that point to the
ram disk, your PATH, SOUND, UUCP vars, etc. 

The way drive letters are assigned is also bad under VPIX.  Assume you
have DOS on your hard drive as a bootable C: partition, and add a UNIX
system in the next partition.  Now set up VPIX, and it creates a file
within the UNIX file system to be C:, and lets you use the DOS
partition on the hard disk as D:.  If you want to use the system
sometimes as a DOS machine and sometimes under VPIX, you have to
really mess around because sometimes the software will be on C: and
other times on D: and you have the added confusion of trying to
remember if you booted under DOS or under UNIX that day. 

If anyone who works on the CMOS setup or fdisk is listening who wants
to do us all a big favor, make it so that we can specify what drive
letter to assign to each partition when we partition the disk.  As for
VPIX, it ought to let you specify what partition it will boot from, so
that when it boots the UNIX file it now calls C: would be F: and it
would boot from F:, then have C: be the bootable DOS partition just as
if you had booted the machine under DOS.  Make it so that we can
specify that we want our ram disk to always be t: (even if there are
drive letters unused between c and t).  If I add a 3rd floppy, I'd
like to be able to tell the system what drive letter to assign to that
floppy, not have the system tell me.  (For those UNIX people out
there, consider how messed up you would be if / and /usr were
exchanged.  That's about what having drive letters swap around like
musical chairs does to you.)
-- 
Flint Pellett, Global Information Systems Technology, Inc.
1800 Woodfield Drive, Savoy, IL  61874     (217) 352-1165
uunet!gistdev!flint or flint@gistdev.gist.com