The Drives icon opens to a view of all disk drives in the system; these are called Drive icons. After "login" to the LAN, any network drives assigned to the user will also be shown here.
Drive icons are container objects which display the contents of the directories available to the user. A Drive object represents the "disk partition" and is, therefore, an abstract, non-copyable object. When a Drive icon is opened, the same Drive icon is seen within it; the difference is that the icon now represents the root directory of that partition and is copyable. Thus a root folder can be copied but a disk partition can't.
Figure "Local Drives and LAN Drives" shows the drives folder after Login.
Directories contain, as before, data, programs and so on. Information pertaining to some of the files may, however, be stored in the OS2.INI file as described in Workplace Shell Implementation. Copying or deleting a file is therefore a non-trivial exercise for OS/2 V2.0 and should be done through the Workplace Shell to ensure integrity. The folder mechanism allows files to be moved and copied within the subdirectories of the main desktop directory. The Drive icons provide the equivalent mechanism for all the directories accessible to the user.
More information can be seen through the Settings view. This makes it easy for the end user but harder for the administrator who now needs to understand much more about how the system works.
The Drives folder is, partially, what the File Manager was in OS/2 Version 1.3. The main differences stem from the object-oriented view which is different from the hierarchical nature of the PM File Manager. The only hierarchy visible is in the tree view of a drive or a folder.
"Sort" can be selected in both the details and icon views. The sort criteria here are different from the purely filename-oriented view of the File Manager because the extension of a filename has limited importance. The type of a file is determined by either OS/2 V2.0 or by the user. It can then be used to sort the folder contents.
For example, when "sort by type" is selected, all executable files are in one group and are sorted by name within that group. This block can thus include files with the extensions EXE, CMD and COM mixed within it.
The drives folders do not display only the files contained in a directory. They also show any shadow copies or program references which may exist in the folder associated with that directory. Folders are linked to subdirectories of the main desktop directory. This information is stored in the OS2.INI file, as described in The OS2.INI File, and in the directory Extended Attributes (EAs). This applies to both local objects on the workstation and objects on the LAN drives used by the workstation.