B drive..

[Snoopz]

Does anyone know why pc's have any number of drives denoted by a letter of the alphabet but no 'B' drive?

[Skids]

The B drive is the letter for a second floppy disk drive should there be one fitted.

[stevie21]

In the olden days, the A drive was exactly as it is now. For floppy discs where the magnetic surface isn't exposed at all.

The B drive, back then, was for a bigger sized disc where part of it was exposed.

Today's 3.25 inch disc and yesteryear's 5.25 inch effort

[rojash]

What a lot of nonsense stevie21. As Skids says, B was reserved for a second drive - regardless of type. When no second drive was fitted, you could still use it as it behaved as a virtual drive. For example, in DOS you could type "Copy A: B:" and it would copy the contents of the disk in A: to a buffer, then ask you to insert a disk in drive B:, at which point you would replace the disk with a blank to be used as the destination disk.

[Kerplunk]

You could always just type copy A: A:

[vehelpfulguy]

Snoopz, believe it or not early PCs had NO hard disk.

All information was stored on floppy disks, the operating system, applications, user data.

So we needed 2 floppy disks, and as others have said A was the first floppy disk, B was the second floppy disk.

When hard drives came C then became the hard drive which is why even today the first hard drive is always C.

[RogerWilco]

You're right Kerplunk, but if you wanted to copy a file from one disk to another, you could type "Copy A:\Fred.txt B:\". And be prompted to replace the disk after the file had been read.