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Curious about Explorer view



 
 
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  #1  
Old March 5th 19, 03:43 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
pjp[_10_]
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Default Curious about Explorer view


Why does Explorer show external/portable disk drives as Hard Disks
rather than Removable Storage? Seems to me they should be considered
removable storage as that's what they actually are.
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  #2  
Old March 5th 19, 05:56 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Posts: 10,881
Default Curious about Explorer view

pjp wrote:

Why does Explorer show external/portable disk drives as Hard Disks
rather than Removable Storage? Seems to me they should be considered
removable storage as that's what they actually are.


Perhaps because the USB presentation data (for the class type) sent from
the device to identify itself to the OS is for disk instead of, say,
optical media or flash media, or it identifies itself as an MSD (mass
storage device) but a different subclass (command set).

http://microchipdeveloper.com/usb:device-classes
https://www.usb.org/defined-class-codes

Alas, they didn't have links to the subclasses available under the 08
class (for mass storage device), and I wasn't motivated to investigate.
From some cursory reading, the subclass specifies which command set to
use for the device type (class). So far for the 08 MSD device class,
I've found the following subclasses (command sets):

01 RBC (e.g., flash drive)
02 SFF-8020i (ATAPI precursor), MMC-2 (ATAPI) - e.g., multimedia cards
03 QIC-157 - e.g., CD-ROM, and magnetic tape
04 Floppy (UFI)
05 SFF-8070i
06 SCSI

https://usb-ids.gowdy.us/read/UC/08
https://cscott.net/usb_dev/data/devclass/msco_v109.pdf, chapter 2
  #3  
Old March 5th 19, 09:53 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
JJ[_11_]
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Posts: 744
Default Curious about Explorer view

On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 22:43:54 -0400, pjp wrote:
Why does Explorer show external/portable disk drives as Hard Disks
rather than Removable Storage? Seems to me they should be considered
removable storage as that's what they actually are.


In Windows, a removable storage device type is a storage device with
removable storage media. e.g. floppy drive, optical drive, ZIP drive. i.e.
the storage type refers to the media, not the reader device.
  #4  
Old March 5th 19, 11:40 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
J. P. Gilliver (John)[_4_]
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Default Curious about Explorer view

In message , VanguardLH
writes:
pjp wrote:

Why does Explorer show external/portable disk drives as Hard Disks
rather than Removable Storage? Seems to me they should be considered
removable storage as that's what they actually are.


Perhaps because the USB presentation data (for the class type) sent from
the device to identify itself to the OS is for disk instead of, say,
optical media or flash media, or it identifies itself as an MSD (mass
storage device) but a different subclass (command set).

[]
If it helps, think of it as that the medium can't be removed from the
drive: the drive itself can be removed (from the computer), but the
media can't be removed from the drive.

Compare a USB card reader, floppy drive, or optical (CD/DVD) drive: in
those, the medium can be removed but the reader/drive remain connected.
--
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truth over time. - Scott Adams, 2015-2-2
  #5  
Old March 5th 19, 04:54 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
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Default Curious about Explorer view

Wolf K wrote:
On 2019-03-04 21:43, pjp wrote:

Why does Explorer show external/portable disk drives as Hard Disks
rather than Removable Storage? Seems to me they should be considered
removable storage as that's what they actually are.



Explorer actually shows partitions, not disks. Windows assigns a "drive
letter" to every user-accessible partitions. [1]

The confusion between disk and partition started aeons ago, maybe
because "disk" is a shorter word. Or maybe because Windows formats a
disk drive as one partition by default. Or maybe because from the user's
POV a partition is a separate storage device. Or... Take your pick.

[1] But manufacturers may introduce inconsistency. On prebuilt systems,
a recovery/repair partition may be given a drive letter. There may be a
technical reason for this, if so, anyone know?


You don't assign drive letters to partitions unnecessarily.
If the OS isn't assigning a letter, there is probably
a reason for it.

On a small partition of type 0x07, you may have the ability
to assign a drive letter, but once you do, the system will
write "System Volume Information" at the root level of the
partition. And, with carelessness, could start using
storage space in there. The end result, was "partition full"
warnings that the user could not figure out. And it was
because they put a drive letter on something that
doesn't particularly need one.

If the partition type is 0x27 (hidden NTFS), then you cannot
mount the partition in userland, neither can you assign a drive
letter. Windows seems to be a trifle inconsistent in how
it's handled those. As I could find OSes where the small
partition was 0x07 and ones where it was 0x27 (hidden).

In Linux, if you want to "look in there", without changing
the partition type field with PTEDIT32, you can always
try a loopback mount with an offset parameter, which
allows mounting "anything that looks like an NTFS partition" :-)
Which is a cool capability. On the Windows side, I'm not
aware of an interface to allow doing that. Although it
could exist.

*******

The only reason for making a recovery partition visible, is if
you have an EXE on there that "kicks off recovery". Normally,
recovery would require a reboot, and the OS wouldn't be running
while the C: is being overwritten.

Some recovery partitions have a "PQ" or PowerQuest notation
as their partition type. If you have such a machine, you could
trace down what the partition type field is. There's some
brief mention of some PowerQuest entries here. There's probably
nothing particularly strange about the partition and it's
actually a FAT32 or NTFS or so. By using strange values
(I think Dell has a value it uses too), it prevents the
end-user from getting too inquisitive.

https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitio...n_types-1.html

*******

And that's also why I wish this had a Windows port. As it
can give you hints when nothing else is helping. It will
analyze HDD and ODD and tell you the partition structure.
The copy I use, is extracted from a Cygwin tree. You don't
need to keep the Cygwin tree around, to run Cygwin programs.
Just the two main (runtime) DLLs have to be present, for
stuff to work.

http://disktype.sourceforge.net/

This is an example, as run from Command Prompt...

--- /dev/sdb
Block device, size 931.5 GiB (1000204886016 bytes)
DOS/MBR partition map
Partition 1: 72.58 GiB (77934495744 bytes, 152215812 sectors from 63, bootable)
Type 0x0C (Win95 FAT32 (LBA))
Windows NTLDR boot loader
FAT32 file system (hints score 5 of 5)
Volume size 72.56 GiB (77915455488 bytes, 2377791 clusters of 32 KiB)
Partition 2: 858.9 GiB (922267745280 bytes, 1801304190 sectors from 152215875)
Type 0x07 (HPFS/NTFS)
NTFS file system
Volume size 858.9 GiB (922267744768 bytes, 1801304189 sectors)

Paul
 




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