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Drive Designators
MS-DOS uses letters to identify the disk drives in your system. If you
have one diskette drive, that device is known as drive A. If you have
two diskette drives, one is called drive A, the other drive B.
If you have one hard disk drive, MS-DOS identifies its primary
partition as drive C, even if you have only one diskette drive. If you
have more than one physical hard disk drive, the primary partition of
the second drive is known as D, the primary partition of the third is
E, and so on.
If you have used the FDISK command (described in Chapter 3) to
create one or more extended partitions, the logical drives that make
up the extended partition(s) are identified by the letters immediately
following the names of all the primary partitions. For example, if you
have one physical drive that’s partitioned into three logical drives, the
logical drives are C, D, and E. If you have two physical drives
partitioned into a total of five logical drives (three on the first physical
drive and two on the second), the first physical drive is divided into
logical drives C, E, and E while the second physical drive is divided
into logical drives D and G.
The Default Drive
At any given time, MS-DOS considers one disk drive to be the
default drive. The default drive is the one on which MS-DOS
executes your next command, unless you tell it to do otherwise. For
example, if the default drive is C, and you issue the DIR (directory)
command, MS-DOS lists the files stored on drive C. If the default
drive is D and you type WP and press
Enter,
MS-DOS looks on drive
D for a file called WI’ and executes the instructions in that file.
The MS-DOS command prompt tells you which drive is the current
default. The command prompt consists of the drive letter followed by
a “greater-than” symbol. (Depending on how your system has been
set up, the command prompt may also include additional
information.) Thus, when you see C > displayed on your screen, you
know that the default drive is C. The command prompt also lets you
know that MS-DOS is ready to receive a command from you.
5-2
Using MS-DOS with Your Equity 386