Just a random thought - is Windows capable of coping with more than twenty-six drives (ie including partitions etc.)? I was just wondering, given that I installed a multi-card reader, which got recognised as six new drives (one for each card slot), which takes me all the way from A: to L:. All I’d need would be a few network drives and an external one with several partitions, and I’d run out of letters. What would happen?
26 drives is not your lot. The most obvious point is that network drives can be accessed using UNC names: no drive letter is necessary. Under XP, if you use Dynamic drives, you can mount partitions on fixed disks within other partitions on fixed disks. RAID adapters and fancy CD changers / jukeboxes can also obviate the limit. And you may be able to use drives like !:, #:, ~:, and &: - try playing with SUBST in a command window (I’ve not tried all the characters and it may depend on the installed redirectors) but whether Windows will auto-assign these is another matter: Disk Administrator in NT (for example) will only allow A: to Z: as selectable letters.
BTW I’d strongly suggest manually assigning your card reader explicit drive letters at the back end of the alphabet if you’re going to be plugging in extra drives to prevent later problems with changing drive letters.
I’m sure there’s an article on Microsoft’s Technet, but I’ve not managed to locate it.
Or, of course, you could take the easy way and install Linux and use that to access as many drives as you want, with no problems naming any of them.
That would probably be less hassle than dealing with whatever kludge MS cooked up to deal with MS-DOS’s drive naming scheme.
As Quartz said, if the drives are NTFS in Windows 2000 or XP you don’t have to give them letters. You can create an empty folder on your C: and mount a drive so that its contents appear in that folder. You do that in Drive Management.