Interface Blogs

One way or another I have been teaching and explaining the ARC Naming convention as it used in the Windows 'boot.ini' file for about 10 years.

Most of the recipients groan as soon as this lecture commences and are completely absorbed with questions like: "How do I know when to use 'multi' or 'scsi'?" and "Once I figure that out, do I use 'disk' or 'rdisk'.

Sample ARC Naming paths follow:

scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)

Recently, after finishing the conversation, one student piped up with this question: "What does 'rdisk' stand for?"

I know at one time I knew the answer to this (about 10 years ago) but over the years it has gone to the place in my memory where things like my telephone number from 15 years ago went. Probably accessible through hypnosis, but otherwise just a glimmer in the face of the question. I went searching for the answer using, of course, the ever present Internet.

What I discovered was that no one (as far as I can tell) has asked this question in some time based on the response I got for several search terms on a number of search engines. Almost all the hits I got lead to pages which discussed the 'ordinal number' (that's the number following the term 'rdisk' (ex. rdisk(0)). I read through a couple of descriptions of the ARC Naming path and in a couple of these little online lectures found the term 'ROM-enabled' . . .

Maybe the reason that this information seems to be difficult to find is because it's rated . . . 'R'?

(OK, you can groan now!)