On 3/6/2013 10:15 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> On 2/27/2013 10:12 AM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>>> I miss on the Acorn where you could just reference drives by the name of
>>> the disk in the drive. In windows why can't I rename my external drive
>>> "backup" and then write to "backup:\", it even comes up in the Win7
>>> address bar in explorer...
>>>
>>
>> Because DOS.
>>
>>
> More like, "Because lazy". You can name drives under DOS, I think you
> could even do so with a floppy, but then your application has to
> "manually" check to make sure that the name is the same, since they a)
> never added a way to reference, as far as I know, the drive name as a
> means to write to it, and b) the OS doesn't check if the name changed on
> its own, as far as I am aware.

Of course, there is a bloody stupid "DOS" way to do it:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/47849/refer-to-select-a-drive-based-only-on-its-label-i-e-not-the-drive-letter

Or the "useless" method:

A volume GUID path, for example, 
\\?\Volume{26a21bda-a627-11d7-9931-806e6f6e6963}\.

Or.. Maybe a UNC... Hmm. Ah, hah, this would work, with a few 
adjustments. The examples given on one page is:

http://compnetworking.about.com/od/windowsnetworking/g/unc-name.htm

"Consider a standard Windows XP computer named teela. In addition to the 
built-in admin$ share, say you have also defined a share point called 
temp that is located at C:\temp. Using UNC names, you would connect to 
folders on teela as follows:

\\teela\admin$ (to reach C:\WINNT)
\\teela\admin$\system32 (to reach C:\WINNT\system32)
\\teela\temp (to reach C:\temp)"

But, its not going to let you "access" it that way normally, since its 
only directing you to C: locations. If you make it a mapped network 
drive, then, you still sort of can't do it without the drive letter. 
**However** if you create an empty folder, called backup, on the C: 
drive, then you can "mount" your external drive to that folder, and then 
reference the folder as, "\\yournetworkname\backup\", at least, from 
what I can tell applying the information on UNC above, with the 
information from here:

http://serverfault.com/questions/8832/if-i-refer-to-a-local-external-usb-drive-by-its-network-unc-name-mycomputer

But, its overly damned complicated, given something that should be 
simple. But, then, this is Windows... lol

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