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This is an annoyance more than a roadblock, but it doesn't seem to make sense.

On my XP box, I got used to subst or mapping drive A: to my general notes and work in progress folders, and drive B: was my current project's source code that I was working on. As these are historical drives that don't get used by a hardware device anymore, I felt safe using them.

Now on Win7 - I can subst or map either drive and use them at the command, but the Windows GUI does not seem to display B: as a drive. though I can navigate to it in the address bar.

What's up with this?

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3 Answers 3

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Floppy drives are all but dead, but Windows still reserves those drive letters for them for backwards compatibility. Yes, you can map drive to A: and B:, however if you have a floppy drive built in, or use a USB drive, then Windows will use A: and B: and It will show up with a floppy icon under My Computer. Unfortunately, I can only assume its by design (although I dont know why) that Windows wont show you drives mapped to A: or B: under My computer.

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  • I didn't test with network shares, but it seems to have no problem at all with local SUBSTed drives.
    – Karan
    Commented Jun 26, 2013 at 1:48
  • interesting... i tested with network shares. maybe a bug?
    – Keltari
    Commented Jun 26, 2013 at 1:49
  • Perhaps... Can you test with local drives?
    – Karan
    Commented Jun 26, 2013 at 1:50
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Windows 7 as a OS, Floppy was considered Out-Of-Date as the answer Keltari (user) shows. Although again yes if you use a USB Floppy Drive it will show that as in C:/...shell... for the icons it has a present path for that image and drive letter let alone save one when a CD is used to install that drive.

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Kinda makes sense now ... It could be a specific design decision to make the windows explorer GUI easier for 'regular' or less experienced users.

Someone reminded me that a non-existent drive B: could be used as a destination to copy from the actual drive A:. It was used by the diskcopy utility that duplicated disk images of floppies, and a prompt would display to swap disks when copying an individual file from floppy to floppy.

So windows explorer could prevent a user from getting the baffling "insert disk in drive B:" message, when they tried to drag individual files to a drive B: drop target by not displaying that as a target.

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  • Did you see the comment I posted yesterday? Do you face the same issue with local SUBSTed drives as well not showing up as A: and B:?
    – Karan
    Commented Jun 28, 2013 at 1:33
  • Thanks Karan, both Subst and net map work just fine at the command line prompt - but I was wanting to see this in the GUI explorer, where I can't B to appear.
    – Rawheiser
    Commented Jul 2, 2013 at 15:58
  • So even if you SUBST a local dir (not a network location) as A: or B: (for example subst A: C:\Users), the drives don't show up in Explorer?
    – Karan
    Commented Jul 2, 2013 at 16:37
  • Yes that is correct, In Windows 7 they do not, haven't tried 8 yet but I am assuming it doesn't work there either.
    – Rawheiser
    Commented Jul 2, 2013 at 20:59
  • Weird. As you can see from my screenshot it works fine for me in Win7.
    – Karan
    Commented Jul 3, 2013 at 7:48

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