[geeks] Windows stupidity

[nate at portents.com]

> Windows is based upon the concept that drive letters are assigned at boot
> time, the boot drive is C,

Boot drive is not necessarily C, though it commonly is. (You can install
different versions of Windows on the same machine, and when you do it
typically takes the next free drive letter for the next Windows install,
though lots of brain-dead Windows software is badly written and doesn't
always cope well with a boot drive that isn't C, despite it being a fully
supported scenario by the OS.)

> the first partition of each hard drives is then
> added, then the optical drives, then each extra partition.
>
> This can be easily modified by either GUI or command line to assign drive
> letters to devices. Once assigned the drive leter sticks with that device,
> until you assign another one. I don't know how to unassign a drive letter
> completely (go back to dynamic assignment), but I'm sure it's been done.

I wouldn't call it "completely dynamic", because the registry stores what
volumes (tracked by their semi-unique VolumeID) are mapped to given drive
letters.

If you want to look at what the registry is remembering on a given
machine, look here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

(You'll need to go there to manually fix things via a remote registry edit
if you ever do an in-place upgrade reinstall of Windows booted off the CD
when Windows was originally installed in a multi-boot situation where the
most recent install got a driver letter other than C and the upgrade
changed it back to C which would result in you being unable to log in...
wheee...)

At the end of the day, Windows is a mashup of CP/M (which DOS ripped off),
VMS (because MS hired Dave Cutler and other DEC folks to make NT), BSD
(TCP/IP networking stack), and the Lisa Office System (where a lot of it's
earliest GUI ideas came from), with a whole bunch of other mutations
thrown in from countless software engineering groups, while simultaneously
trying to please everyone and maintain backward compatibility, and frankly
it shows.

- Nate