On 29/03/2016 22:34, T i m wrote:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 21:02:58 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

snip

You
can use *nix style grafting of volumes into another directory tree if
you like.

And I would say, outside the admin / geek, few would want to. ;-)

It can help if you have quite a few partitions, and then also things
like multi format card readers that can gobble letters.

Oh indeed, I've seen that. However, I still stand by my suggestion
that few people are bothered by them. They are just another thing they
don't really understand but work their way round.

Just in the same way they don't know the taskbar from the desktop or
the desktop from their browser home page. ;-)

True - if the difficulty some seem to have with instructions like "open
your web browser" are anything to go by ;-)

Of all the platforms I have used, I think I liked the Amiga way of doing
drives and volumes the best[1]. You could create physical device names
as you liked (either defined in a mountlist file, or as a separate mount
listette file in the Drivers folder). You could also create an
assignment that looked like a device name or volume name, but pointed
somewhere else like a folder on a hard drive or network.

I just turned mine on and played games on them. ;-)

Well if you got to the stage of installing the game on the hard drive,
then it became very useful to stick an "assign nameofgamedisk:
system:games/nameofgamefolder" into the user-startup script. ;-)

You could refer to a drive by its name (say dh0: for a hard drive) or by
its volume label (say system. If you used the volume label it did not
care what physical drive it was in. So it made handling of removable
media very nice - you could refer to MyCDName:somepath/somefile and if
it could not find the volume it just promoted you to put it into any
drive (which could include copying the CD to a hard drive folder and
then assigning that name to the folder).

I sort of follow that. 'Very flexible'.

Indeed - and allowed easy separation of a logical volume from a physical
device name or mount location.

It still bugs me today when
installing a multi DVD game for example that Windows will frequently
insist that you stick all the discs one by one into the same drive, and
can't make use of multiple DVD drives...

I'm not sure that's 'Windows' as such but the installer routine?

Well windows does have a default installer (that handles .msi files) -
however the same problem seems to exist with most of the commercial
installers like installshield etc.

ITRW,
how many people have more than one optical drive (or even one working
optical drive for that matter)?

A diminishing number I would guess. I normally have at least two in a
machine since it makes disk to disk copies faster.

It would also be handy sometimes to map drives on other machines, so you
could slap say your 6 DVDs from the latest game etc into as many drives,
and say "go install that, and don't bother me for as long as it takes".

I've just given him back the current motherboard box back with the
user manual, the blanking panels for the front of the case and
expansion slots, driver CD and an Ethernet cable (as I said they
should keep at least one handy for testing etc).

There was a time with corporate customers I would give them all that
kind of stuff with their new machines. Gave up in the end because the
usually just binned it or failing that could not find it if you ever
wanted it. Easier to just keep a stock of bits they might need myself!


--
Cheers,

John.

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