Why doesn't hard drive start on A:?

You've probably used or seen a Windows computer and you might have noticed that the first letter used is C: for the hard drives. Why is that?

Written by Tomas Lyngen

Published: 02 Oct 2021

If you used computers in the 80's, 90's and 20's, you probably already know the answer to this question. If you take a moment to think about what you no longer have on your computer, that you always had back then

The first computers didn't even have a hard drive, but run everything from a storage device called floppy disk

When hard-drives started to be used, the next natural letter to use was C:

If you plugged in a floppy disk, they would take up A-Drive and B-Drive, then hard drive would take the C-Drive

Why still use C-Drive in 2021? My computer don't have floppy disk, it doesn't even have CD/DVD-Rom

Many programs expect Windows to be on C-Drive and user's are used to finding Windows on C-Drive. Microsoft have continued the practice of having the first hard drive with Windows to be on C-Drive

If you want, you are able to change Windows to A-Drive, but this can cause some applications to not work as intended

I haven't even seen a floppy disk

You definitely seen a floppy disk, you just probably didn't know what it was

Floppy disks are commonly used as a save icon in many applications and games. Word is one of these applications that uses a floppy disk as a save icon

Tags: #Windows