The Amiga mounts a number of devices on bootup to allow the user or program to access particular I/O (Input Output) devices on the system. These can be actual physical devices such as a printer or virtual devices like the RAM disk. Devices have different names followed by a colon. Unlike the PC these are actually something to do with the device rather than cryptic messages such as drive C: or D:, which leaves you guessing which is the CD drive and which is the hard drive. Some examples of devices are:

CC0: Only present if you have a A1200. This accesses the PCMCIA slot.

CD0: The CD drive.

CON: A console window, similar to the Shell window that only displays text.

DF0: The internal floppy drive. The DFx acronym stands for Drive Floppy.

DF1: The second external floppy drive.

DH0: The first hard drive partition on the Amiga.

HD0: Another name that some people call the hard drive.

MAC0: A software file system that allows access to Apple Mac disks as if they were Amiga disks.

PAR: The parallel port device.

PC0: A software driver used to access PC disks. Standard with WB3.x.

PIPE: A software device for passing data between two currently running programs.

PRT: The printer port device.

RAM: The Ram disk, an "elastic" device that expands and contracts according to what is stored there.

SER: The serial port SYS: The "system" disk that was booted from.

ZIP0: A Zip drive. If you have one connected. There are also a number of "assigns" made that act as a shortcut to certain directories. These are made in the startup-sequence. C: The commands directory.

DEVS: Contains all devices, such as the printer, Dosdriver, keymaps etc.

ENVARC: All preference files are stored here.

FONTS: The fonts directory.

HELP: Contains AmigaGuide that are used as an online reference.

KEYMAPS: The keymap used, according to the country that you are in.

L: The handler files.

LIBS: The libraries directory.

LOCALE: Sets the location of the machine.

PRINTER: The directory that stores info on the currently selected printer.

S: The S directory, where the Startup-sequence is stored.

T: The temp directory, for files that are not really required for a short time.

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