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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alex Abuin ?+!=$$$ who wrote (34957)	11/10/1997 3:23:00 PM
From: Brendan2012	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58324

re: A: Drive assignment for Zip It's just one more step along the way toward eliminating the floppy. The A: drive is the better assignment since the computer looks there first when booting. The 3.5 inch floppy first came in as a B: drive also, but then slowly it became the A: drive, displacing the 5.25 to the B: position. Of course the 5.25 disappeared not too much later. I think this step represents even more of a commitment to the Zip by Micron. It's not really much of a change for the user, though. Brendan

To: Alex Abuin ?+!=$$$ who wrote (34957)	11/11/1997 5:05:00 PM
From: FuzzFace	Respond to of 58324

Alex, re: A drive. First, sorry this is so late. Hard time keeping up lately. If others have already explained the significance of the A drive to the IBM compatible PC users, I apologize. The critical issue concerning drive letter assignment is that PCs have historically had only two boot drive options, 'A' and 'C'. Drive letters 'A' and 'B' have been for floppies, 'C' and up for hard drives. Zip and other removables have confused the issue by using drive letters after 'C' . For example, in my "production" system, I assigned my ATAPI Zip the drive letter 'Z' via the Win95 Device Manager software. But before Win95 initializes, it is assigned a drive letter by the BIOS, a letter that depends on the number of HD partitions I have visible during that bootup. A switchover occurs during Win95 GUI initialization from the BIOS assigned letter to 'Z'. Recently, BIOS manufacturers have started adding ZIP/LS120, CDROM, and Network card bootup options, as well as the option to boot from all 4 hard drives allowed by EIDE. With such a BIOS and Win95 OSR2, I have gained the ability to boot from a Zip drive with no Zip tools software. The system is slow and doesn't use all the native Win95 drivers, but it does bring up an emergency system with the full GUI, and that makes it worth it. For a more detailed look at what I went through to get there, read my post: techstocks.com My assumption is that Micron has licked the problem of the drive letter changing during Win95 initialization. This was probably done with a new driver supplanting the original MS Win95 driver. Maybe MS wrote it, maybe not. The bottom line is, as the permanent 'A' drive, the user can treat a Zip drive as a 100MB fully bootable floppy with no need for the Tools software in normal operation. This is what we have been waiting for as it removes the final technical obstacle to Zip replacing the floppy. The only remaining obstacles are non-technical in nature.