Talk:763: Workaround

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This comic is broken:

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surrounding the comic should not happen. Some experiments???--Dgbrt (talk) 23:04, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Six partitions, C through J... Which two letters are missing? Mumiemonstret (talk) 14:23, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Well I assume D: is the DVD Burner and E: the BluRay drive? Just guessing, who still has optical drives these days, Fuck optical drives :0 --108.162.254.66 09:54, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

I found that, starting with XP, and particularly now with 7, the drive letters Windows automatically assigns to new devices started to not make much sense... The main system partition is C, the manufacturer recovery partition is D (really must get round to "hiding" that) and after that it's a free for all. The DVD drive (which I still have semi regular use of for various reasons), a gaggle of USB hard disks, memory sticks and card readers, any fresh ones I might end up creating on the internal HDD, and even the built-in SD card slot, all fight for whatever letters they can get, though once a drive is assigned one it tends to stick with it... for an arbitrary length of time, which may be a matter of hours, or maybe a decade-plus, at which point some other new (or occasionally, another existing) drive will co-opt that letter and bump the original down the list. Optical drive seems to get priority, then the external HDDs, then the memory sticks and card readers, but it's not an absolute.

So if he's ever used a USB drive at any point, especially before adding a new internal HDD for extra storage, there could well be a gap...

I'm also no stranger to the "squillions of partitions" issue, at least back in the Win98 era. One family machine ended up with no fewer than three different HDDs in it all at once, each with at least two partitions for various reasons (not least partition size limits / sector size efficiency, and improved ease of backing up using a utility that imaged the partitions separately onto CDRW without any compression), including one each for the various family members, the system drive, programs, games, and shared documents. On top of which there was the floppy, two optical drives (DVDROM, CDRW) and an IDE Zipdisk (yes, you heard right... both built-in IDE ports plus a PCI expansion card with a third port put to full use) and at least one virtual image-drive, and a parallel port smartmedia card reader. All this at the start of the USB-drive era, under 98SE with the USB patch. Suffice to say there were a lot of letters in use.

...and this is what was done by four people who were each generally fairly competent with computers, an a couple of them rather more so, such that we were usually the ones being asked for help rather than the other way around. I would at this point say "so who knows what fresher hells might be brewed up by those who didn't know what they were doing was even more wrong than the deliberate mistakes we were forced to make", but I've seen enough of them first hand through friends, colleagues and extended family to not have to wonder o_O; 141.101.106.113 12:56, 9 October 2015 (UTC)