Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations bkrike on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Changing drive letter from B: to A:

Status
Not open for further replies.

Fulop

Instructor
Dec 29, 2004
3
CA
I was wondering if somebody can help me change my floppy drive which is currently labelled as B: to A:. I have an IBM ThinkPad 770E laptop running Windows 2000 Professional. I tried going into Disk Management but my drives don't show up - only my hard drive shows. My laptop has swappable drives, I don't know if that is what's causing the problem. Currently my swappable CD drive is labelled as D:, hard drive obviously is C:, my swappable floppy is B: and the A: (which does exist) is registered as another floppy drive which I can't access. Let me know if you can help out.
 
Have you tried accessing the bios settings to see if they have both floppy drives 'activated'?
 
Fulop,
I can't believe nobody has answered your question. I heard someone say they are "certifiable" but not "certified" - I believe that I am as well. :) (self taught). I actually joined this site just to answer you, so I hope you see it. As far as I know, (at least on regular PC's...) the way that your computer designates "A" or "B" as the floppy drive letter is by the cable that is hooked to it. Have you ever noticed a "twist" in 7 of the wires in a floppy cable? If there exists this twist between the mainboard end and the drive end of the cable, your computer should see the device as drive letter "A". If there is not a twist it will show up as "B". Check to see if you have a floppy cable that has connectors for two drives. Usually the middle connector is in-line before the twist and is used for drive "B". If this is the case, hook up the other end to the drive. If not, find a cable with the twist in it and use that one. I hope that this applies to laptops - and that I answered your question. Thanks,

Guy
 
Actually, it is more complicated than a cable twist, particularly for a notebook.

If you have one floppy drive, it will respond as both A: and B:, although there will be a message to insert a disk.

If you are patient, try it. Start, Run, copy a: b:

Disk Management MMC snap-in is not designed to manipulate floppy disks.

See the following (albeit the discussion is about hard disk drives). The registry entries for the enumeration of devices is the same for floppies.

I would, honestly, just leave the situation alone.
 
Thanks GTC1 for joining the site to help me out. I really appreciate it. Your advice seem really helpful and I'm sure lots of users will benefit from your knowledge. I think I'm just going to leave it alone, as per bcastner's advice, it's not a major issue for me so I think I'm just going to let it be. Bcastner - thanks for your advice too, I really appreciate it as well.

Keep up the good work guys.

 
Fulop, you are being nice, as I forgot to include the link I intended above.

You can fool with the Mounted Devices portion of the registry to change the drive letters. This MS KB article is in fact addressing a different issue, but the registry changes you would need are perfectly apt as described:
Again, I would let this sleeping dog lie.

Best wishes,
Bill Castner
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top