media:/ shows unnecessary media

[Giuseppe Bilotta]

On Thu, 26 May 2005 17:30:26 +0000, Rajeev J Sebastian wrote:

> XP (from 98 onwards i think) supports changing the volume labels.

DOS partitions have supported disk labels since the days of version 2
at least (maybe even 1?). All version of FAT (12, 16, 32) and NTFS do
support labels :)

Concerning the drive letters: in the old DOS days there was a fixed
order in which drive letters were assigned. A: and B: reserved for
floppies, B: being a ghost virtual floppy drive when the system only
had one; from C: on they are assigned to the active primary partition
of each hard disk first, then letters are assigned to logical
paritions grouped by hard disk; so if you had two hard disks, the one
with three partitions (a primary and two logical) and the second with
two partitions, letters would be assigned as such: C, E, F on the
first disk, D, G on the second). CD-ROMs letter were assigned by the
mscdex extension. Windows 9x and ME inherit this sytem. Windows NT
family, OTOH, allows users to arbitrarily assign letters to mountable
partitions, so there would be no guarantee that a Linux-guessed system
matched the Windows one (even though the default still remains the DOS
way). So yes, the label way seems like a good idea --or at least, it
would be so if the label was actually used ... I wonder how many
people actually label their disks? Maybe we run the risk of coming up
with "no name 1", "no name 2" etc :) But then again this would
probably still be more friendly than "/dev/hda?" (as long as the
latter still remains as a visible extra info :))

-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain
a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty
nor safety." Benjamin Franklin