Microsoft Windows is the most popular operating system, powering Laptop and PCs, in the world. It has been through various iterations over the years with Windows 10 being the latest.
Third party reference image
Although Windows had its ups and downs, some things have remained constant like the use of letter “C” for the default System drive. You must be wondering so what happened to letters “A” and “B”? In this post, we will the answer those questions.
In Windows, you would have noticed that drive letters for hard disk partitions start from “C” and continues from there. All next partitions even the external sources like CDs, pen drives take letters like “D”, “E”, “F” and so on.
Well, the reason why we don’t see letters “A” or “B” is historical. Microsoft Windows operating system is based on MS-DOS, formerly DOS developed by IBM. In those days, the floppy disk was the primary storage medium, there were no hard disks or pen drives at that time. The letter “A” and “B” were used to detect floppy disk by DOS operating system on which Windows is based.
Later when newer systems started supporting hard disks, the letter “A”, “B” needed to be reserved for floppy disks as many people had old machines and still used floppy disks. Newer OS versions can’t just render all those floppy drives useless and had to maintain backward compatibility. This was the reason why these letters are reserved and hard disk partitions start from letter “C”.
BTW, if you really want it is possible to rename and assign drive letter “A” or “B” to disk drives under disk management in Windows. Here is a screenshot for the same.
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