&gt; Windows still refers to devices by physical location.<p>Nope, not since NT. I learned that the hard way when moving a HDD containing Win2k around. Even though it was hooked to IDE master it would come up as D: as that was what it was assigned after it got formated with NTFS.<p>You can go into disk manager and assign a partition any letter than is not already in use.<p>You can even mount a partition into a existing FHS, much like on unix, but i can&#x27;t say i have seen it used often.<p>Basically the letters are there for backwards compatibility.