From Trag: Oh, yes. Into the Pentium era (I think some were auto-detecting by this time), if you wanted to install a new hard drive, you better copy down the sectors/heads/cylinder numbers written on the drive before putting it in the machine. Then configure the BIOS at start up so it would recognize the drive. Then run DOS so you could run Fdisk to partition the disk and then initialize it and assign it a fixed drive letter. Woe unto you if you were in a network environment in which networked volumes started at F: and you had a more than three hard drive devices (two hard drives and one optical drive, e.g.).

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There was a top tip in that rant, Jeff. For lots of drives the BIOS parameters are on the label on the top side, so write them down before you install the disk. Then write them down in that exercise book that you use to record all of your installation procedures.

Auto hard disk detection was probably a Pentium II-era feature. You had the option of LBA (Logical Block Addressing) for automatic detection or the painful way. The two cannot be mixed and you can't reliably swap a disk between different PCs.

When installing a disk in a vintage PC, assigning a drive letter is and was a bad thing to do. Let the horrible device make its own horrible decisions. Then sort out the horrible software that looks for a particular drive letter.

Drive letter F: was a choice determined by Novell in the late 1980s. Drive F: was the NetWare logon server volume and in common NetWare usage, it was used for the home directory. Smarter people re-mapped other drive letters to the NetWare home directory so that it was possible to log on to more than one NW server. But the last letter on the line was drive E:.

To be fair to Novell, they made that choice (late 1980s?) when it seemed unlikely that letters A to E would be filled. I think that they changed the drive F: logon volume requirement with NetWare 4 (early/mid 1990s) but that was not a solution for people with lots of old clients. And too late.

Microsoft twigged the problem too. LASTDRIVE in CONFIG.SYS specified the last allowable drive letter, and in non-Novell environments LASTDRIVE was Z. I didn't spend too much time with Microsoft's server offerings before Windows 2000 so I can't comment much, but with Windows 2000 it was clear that you mapped backwards from Z.