Thinkpads Forum

Hello all,

I think this question has come up elsewhere, but I haven't seen an answer, and I hope the local experts might have one.

On my 600X units with Windows XP, the internal floppy drive (right there in the ultrabay, not anywhere else) gets the drive letter B. Windows XP says there is also a drive A, but Windows is either telling a lie or is misinformed, because a disk in the floppy drive is accessible only as drive B.

This is a minor annoyance except with programs like the IBM Personalization Editor that apparently insist on writing to drive A, and don't work with a floppy that's only accessible as drive B.

When I attach the floppy externally, XP sees it as drive A, by the way, but I don't always have the external floppy enclosure easily available.

Is there a way to persuade XP to see the internal floppy as drive A under Windows XP??

Thanks for any help.

Edward Mendelson

Yup, there's a fairly easy way.

Go to Start>Run

Type: diskmgmt.msc

Then find the floppy drives in question. You'll first have to find the A: drive and click on the drive icon in the lower half of the screen (it'll look depressed.) Then right click and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths.." Then select "Change" and change it to something like "Z:"

Repeat the process for the B: drive, but change this to A:

Then go back and change the Z: drive you created earlier to B:

You have to do it this way because you can't have two drives labeled with the same drive path at any time.

That's the first thing I tried - but on my setup, at least, Disk Management doesn't display or control floppy drives, and I've never seen any floppy drives listed on Disk Management on any XP system. Is there a way to get floppies listed there?

Edward Mendelson

I realized that I hadn't logged in to ask this question - for the record, in this thread "guest" is:

Anonymous wrote:That's the first thing I tried - but on my setup, at least, Disk Management doesn't display or control floppy drives, and I've never seen any floppy drives listed on Disk Management on any XP system. Is there a way to get floppies listed there?

Edward Mendelson

Odd, any floppy drive I've used (USB) shows up along with optical drives. I used to remember how to do this adjustment from the registry. I'll take a look and get back.

Ah - I've never tried a USB floppy in XP. The internal 600X floppy certainly doesn't get listed in any system I've looked at!

Here's how to do it from the registry (standard disclaimers apply about responsibility and skill, blah blah blah)

Go to (in the Registry)

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\MountedDevices

Now find your "\DosDevices\A:" key. Right click on it and select Rename. Change it to something else (the letter part)

Then find your "\DosDevices\B:" key and change that name to "\DosDevices\A:" Then go back to your previous change and change that letter to "\DosDevices\B:"

Now comes the daunting part. In the section above the "DosDevices" section is the WinXP naming area. You need to match up the binary data attached to the \DosDevices keys for both the A and B drives and switch the "\??\Volume\{xxx..}" section. It's easier to rename the key than copy the data section from one to the next; but you could do it either way. Just remember that keys can't be named the same thing at the same time.

I tried this method, and I'm afraid it didn't work - Windows refused to cooperate, and reinstalled drives A and B as before. The problem seems to be that the binary data is exactly the same for the two drives - which is not surprising, since there really is only one drive that XP insists on identifying by two different drive letters.

I'll try deleting all the entries related to the floppies and will see what happens then (after backing up, of course!).

Thanks again for the effort!

This: http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... IGR-4LXTJ8 also applies to XP.

Regards,

James

James,

That answers the question!! Many thanks for settling the issue once and for all...

Best wishes,