I have an old PC with a 3.5" drive as "A:" and a 5.25" drive as "B:". One day I wanted to swich the drive letters, making drive A into B and drive B into A. Most sources tells me that I should swich the floppy driver contacts. But on the computer I have; if you try to do anything with the cables to/from the floppy drives, you will get stuck when you tries to reattach them (it's a smaller tower PC, where the 3.5" drive is hidden behind a steel plate designed for 5.25" drives).

To solve this problem, I had to make some sort of swich. I didn't want to ruin the current used floppy drive cable, so I started by using an unused floppycable instead.

Step 1:Make sure you are dealing with a floppy cable designed for 3.5" drives only, because the 5.25" drive contacts is not needed and they make everything more confusing. Make sure no holes is blocked off on the contacts on the floppy cable. This can be fixed by using an older floppy cable. Finaly make sure that your cable has 3 contacts.

Step 2: Cut of the cable just below the drive "A:" contact. You will now have 2 pices of cable, one with 1 contact on, and one with 1 contact in each end (note that there is a 7-cable twist on the cable between those two contacts).

Step 3: On the cable with 2 contacts, cut the 7-cable twist.

Step 4: Seperate the 14 small cables of the cut (not all the way down to the contacts, but a coupple of centimeters). Now take 1.5 CM isolaton off the end of those 14 cables.

Step 5: On the cable with only one contact, try to open the contact (you might use some time doing this. Make sute to not destroy it too much). When you get the contact open, deatatch the cable from it. Seperate 2 groups of 7 small cables from the cable. Repeat step 4 with one end of each of those cables (remember, "14" does now mean "7").

Step 6: Attach the end of those two 7-cable groups to the cables from the cut (one 7 cable group for each side). Tape over as you contact each them, short's inside a computer can be critical.

Step 7: Cut the contact from step 5 in two equal parts.

Sorry, I don't get time to write more now...
I'll makbe tell more about how I made it later.

Or, you know, you could have just remembered which is which and not re-assign them. There is also the option of throwing them away as floppies are pretty much useless.

There's got to be an easier way to do it than that. How about sticking a pair of IDC header blocks between the sockets of two different cables (before the twist, obviously)?

The even easier way would probably be to change it in Windows. I know you can alter the drive letters for things like hard drives and cd-rom drives, so there is probably a way to change floppy letters as well (I would try to do so, but I don't have a floppy )

After all, the concept of an A: and B: floppy are purely that of DOS/Windows, and is therefore inherently a software issue

I don't have a floppy drive, yet I have a drive 'A:' (for Audio). I set it up like that just for kicks.

The point of the expiriment was to make the computer boot from drive B, and I'ts such an old computer so you can't choose which drive to boot from in BIOS.

I'll make a drawing of the special cabel I made soon ( http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs23/f/2007/313/9/a/FloppySwitch_by_annonymus2.jpg ).

*Edit*
I'm using DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.11 ForWorkGroups, so I don't think if it is possible to swich the drive letters without some extra software.

Wow, you can load Cemetech on that software? I'm amazed.

I'm actually not using that computer right now...

As far as I know in all versions of windows the drive letters A: and B: are reserved for floppy drives only. You cannot(even on a motherboard without a floppy interface) assign a harddrive to A or B. All non-floppy drives in windows start the naming at drive C:.

I once on a school computer made my flash drive drive B:\, so it can be done.

I'm surprised you were able to do that, rivereye; I also thought what elite.lumberjack said was true.

I don't think Windows cares much on what drive letter is what, as long as the boot loader is on the C: drive (I had a machine with Windows on the G: drive.

Does anyone know how to set up a windows drive as A: or B I cannot seem to do it on any of the windowses I have.(me,95,2000,xp)

Why would you want to? What possible use could this have?

Others who posted on this said they were able to, I am merely curious how...I have no real purpose for changing hdds to A:/B:.

In Vista here, I can change drive letters in Disk Management (find it somewhere in Control Panel).

I wish I had vista, just so I could try this. XP does not seem to let me set hdds to A:/B:.

I have said that you can in XP also. Same way, you have to open the Disk Manager.

A/B aren't selectable - at least they aren't for me.

To change settings regarding hardware and accounts, right-click on the My Computer shortcut on the Start Menu and select Manage. If you go to disk management and right-click on the drive you want, you should see an option to change the drive letter. I am giving these directions by memory and it is 2:00 AM, so they might not be perfect.