What happens when Windows runs out of drive letters?

[Mini-Me]

Hi there.

With hard-drives selling so cheap, and users needing more and more space on their systems, what happens when we have used all the A-Z drive letters?

Most people these daze partition their drives into multipule partitions to make sorting and handling the data easier.

I already use letters A-K for partitions - won't be that long, with drives now available in excess of a staggering 500GB in capacity, where we are gonna run out of letters in the alphabet!!!
:p

What happens if you want to have more then a total of 26 partitions?

[Paul Komski]

HDDs can only be given a maximum of 24 drive letters - from C through Z at any given time. Perfectly good partitions can be present without a drive letter but of course that makes them inaccessible from My Computer. Under recent (maybe older NT OSes) one can also mount drives in an empty folder somewhere in an NTFS partition.

To do this under WinXP's disk management you would first remove its drive letter and then prepare to add it back again but would then choose the option to "Mount in the following NTFS folder". That way you can still mount more than 24 partitions though they wont be accessible by a drive letter per se.

[Mini-Me]

Mounting drives as folders - Hmmmmm...
:rolleyes:

Sounds like Linux!
:D

OK - so it's not a real problem then.
Just a curiosity of mine.

Thanks.

[Paul Komski]

Sounds like Linux!
The analogy is even greater than you might think when you consider that everything in an NTFS partition is a file. In other words you are using one "file" (be it all called a folder) to reference (or alias) another object (a device file under Linux and be it all a "partition" under NTFS).