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>> 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.
Maybe that's because on DOS/Windows hard drives came along before
multi-tasking? So you never got the situation where you were swapping
floppies around to do several things at once in a multi-tasking
environment. In that situation it's very useful for the OS/app to know
which disc to use, rather than just which drive to use (otherwise you
end up saving your word processor document to your printer driver disc
and then can't find the latest version the next day).
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>>> 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.
>
> Maybe that's because on DOS/Windows hard drives came along before
> multi-tasking? So you never got the situation where you were swapping
> floppies around to do several things at once in a multi-tasking
> environment. In that situation it's very useful for the OS/app to know
> which disc to use, rather than just which drive to use (otherwise you
> end up saving your word processor document to your printer driver disc
> and then can't find the latest version the next day).
>
This sounds like a "been there, done that".
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/* flabreque */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/* @ */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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>> Maybe that's because on DOS/Windows hard drives came along before
>> multi-tasking? So you never got the situation where you were swapping
>> floppies around to do several things at once in a multi-tasking
>> environment. In that situation it's very useful for the OS/app to know
>> which disc to use, rather than just which drive to use (otherwise you
>> end up saving your word processor document to your printer driver disc
>> and then can't find the latest version the next day).
>
> This sounds like a "been there, done that".
Nope, I never went near a DOS/Windows machine until Windows 95 when hard
drives were standard. When I first got my Acorn it only had 1MB RAM and
no hard drive, so everything (apart from the OS which was in ROM) was on
floppies. If you needed to edit a spreadsheet, create a chart and put it
in a desktop publishing document then print it out (as was quite common
for school homework), you'd need to be using at least 3 or 4 different
discs and then it's important you saved all the stuff on the right disc!
I have no idea how DOS/Windows handled such situations before everyone
had hard drives.
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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.
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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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> **However** if you create an empty folder, called backup, on the C:
> drive, then you can "mount" your external drive to that folder,
That's exactly what I do - mounting the external drive using its GUID so
I'm sure it's always the correct drive. Whilst this works, there are a
few "issues". Firstly I have no idea what will happen if the folder
"backup" already exists and has data in it, will that data be
unavailable whilst the drive is mounted to that folder and then reappear
once the drive is unmounted? Also it seems that you need to run the
command prompt or script as admin to get this to work, whereas if you
write directly to the drive via its drive letter you don't. Thirdly you
have to check errors carefully otherwise you end up physically writing
your entire backup to drive C rather than the external drive.
All in all it would be *way* simpler if I could just write "robocopy ...
EXTERNAL:\Backup /MIR".
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Am 07.03.2013 07:50, schrieb Patrick Elliott:
>> 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
Interestingly, the top answer has /nothing/ to do with DOS whatsoever.
(Except of course for the raw fact that drive letters and drive labels
are a DOS legacy, and the author chose to call his visual basic script a
"bat file" for apparently nostalgic reasons.)
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> Am 07.03.2013 07:50, schrieb Patrick Elliott:
>
>>> 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
>>
>
> Interestingly, the top answer has /nothing/ to do with DOS whatsoever.
> (Except of course for the raw fact that drive letters and drive labels
> are a DOS legacy, and the author chose to call his visual basic script a
> "bat file" for apparently nostalgic reasons.)
>
And the second one returns "Bad command or file name", when run from a
DOS6.1 boot floppy, so it doesn't have much to do with DOS either. (Not
that I was expecting it to work...)
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/* flabreque */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/* @ */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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On 3/7/2013 1:20 AM, scott wrote:
>> **However** if you create an empty folder, called backup, on the C:
>> drive, then you can "mount" your external drive to that folder,
>
> That's exactly what I do - mounting the external drive using its GUID so
> I'm sure it's always the correct drive. Whilst this works, there are a
> few "issues". Firstly I have no idea what will happen if the folder
> "backup" already exists and has data in it, will that data be
> unavailable whilst the drive is mounted to that folder and then reappear
> once the drive is unmounted? Also it seems that you need to run the
> command prompt or script as admin to get this to work, whereas if you
> write directly to the drive via its drive letter you don't. Thirdly you
> have to check errors carefully otherwise you end up physically writing
> your entire backup to drive C rather than the external drive.
>
> All in all it would be *way* simpler if I could just write "robocopy ...
> EXTERNAL:\Backup /MIR".
>
Not sure, but it may just fail if you try to mount to a non-empty
folder. Alternatively, what it might do is create a logical
concatenation of the contents, i.e., what ever is there will stay, but
doing a listing of the directory will give you what is there *and* what
is in the mounted drive. But, yeah, having the contents go unavailable,
if not empty, is one possibility.
That said.. assuming you are running the commands in a script, I suppose
there might be some way to check if the mounted folder has some
attribute that shows it is actually a mount, but.. no clue how you would
do that. :p I just thought the thing was interesting enough, especially
if I needed to do it at some point, to hunt down what, if any, solutions
existed.
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On 3/7/2013 7:21 AM, Francois Labreque wrote:
>> Am 07.03.2013 07:50, schrieb Patrick Elliott:
>>
>>>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Interestingly, the top answer has /nothing/ to do with DOS whatsoever.
>> (Except of course for the raw fact that drive letters and drive labels
>> are a DOS legacy, and the author chose to call his visual basic script a
>> "bat file" for apparently nostalgic reasons.)
>>
>
> And the second one returns "Bad command or file name", when run from a
> DOS6.1 boot floppy, so it doesn't have much to do with DOS either. (Not
> that I was expecting it to work...)
>
Great.. Might as well just try to run something via windows scripting
host, for all that those "solutions" do any good then. At least with
that you could, in theory, find some way to get around it.
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