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Why the partition of hard drive starts with C: drive ?

You might have observed that the disk partition starts with C: drive. But why so ? Have you ever asked this question to anybody ? Where is the A: drive ? Why the partition does not starts with "A", even though "A" being the starting letter of the alphabet. Today I will tell you the reason.

The main reason behind this is the drive A: is reserved for first floppy disc and the drive B: is reserved for the second floppy disc. Lets elaborate the concept.

In old days there were only floppy discs which were storing both the operating system and other data. In earlier versions of IBM PCs there was only one floppy drive. Until and unless you purchase another floppy drive, you have to manage your work only with the existing one. But after some years as the cost of the hard drives reduced, computers came to market with two floppy drives.

 

 

At that time IBM started producing IBM PCs which used two floppy drives A and B. The first floppy drive(A) was used to store the operating system and the second floppy drive(B) was used for storing other data. This design was continued for some years. By the time the concept of hard drive came it was widely accepted that the floppy disc A: is used for booting and running common programs and floppy disc B: is used for storing other data. And finally it became a globally accepted standard.

Since that day, when a new hard disc is added to a PC it starts with the letter C as the letter A and B has been reserved for the floppy drives, it does not matter whether a computer physically contains the floppy drives or not. Gradually many software were also built based on the same architecture. They consider drive C: as the main hard drive which contains the operating system.

Only Microsoft Windows operating system categorizes the drives as C, D, E etc. Other operating systems does not use the same naming convention.

Hey, we have another article related to CD drive. How to eject CD drive from a .vbs file

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