Experiment: how to make Windows 11 tell the SSD "Insert a disk into drive A:"

⚡ The gist in 5 seconds - Windows 11 still reserves the letters A and B for devices long absent from mass-produced PCs. - The author of the article tried assigning the letter A to an SSD and got the system message "Insert a disk into drive A:". - It's a fun experiment, not a practical guide — it just shows that Windows' old conventions are still alive and well. ### 🔍 What was discovered The author of an article on Habr decided to test how Windows 11 would react to an attempt to assign the letter A: to an SSD. Even though the disk subsystem of a modern OS no longer requires a strict separation between floppy disks and hard drives, the system doesn't give up the first two letters of the Latin alphabet for regular volumes. Instead, Windows keeps A and B reserved, and when you try to access the device as A:, it displays the familiar message from decades past: "Insert a disk into drive A:". Windows 11 allocates 26 letters for drives — one for each letter of the English alphabet. However, in practice only 24 letters are available to the user, starting with C:. The system ignores the first two positions even for SSDs — the most modern type of storage. During the experiment, the author managed to get the system to address requests to the SSD as drive A:, and in response received the classic notification once seen by owners of computers with floppy disk drives. ### 💡 Why it matters This experiment is a vivid illustration of how deeply historical conventions dating back to the MS-DOS era are embedded in Windows. Even in 2025, when no mass-market PC comes with a floppy drive, the system won't let an SSD volume take the letters A and B. There's no practical benefit to this trick — it's more a reminder that Windows carries decades of compatibility baggage. Still, the very fact that you can "trick" the system into uttering an archaic warning is interesting as a curious technical oddity. ### 🧩 Context The letters A and B were historically assigned to floppy disk drives: A for the first, B for the second. These devices were the standard for personal computers from the 1970s until the early 2000s. When floppy disks fell out of use, Windows kept the first two letters reserved — probably for compatibility with old software and drivers that might access them directly. Modern versions of Windows, including Windows 11, continue to follow this rule, leaving users only letters starting with C:. That's exactly the convention the author of the experiment demonstrated, making the SSD temporarily "pose" as drive A:.

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