Can you run out of Drive Letters?

[mAdD INDIAN]

Hey..

I was just wondering if we could run out of drive letters?? Like if we have more than 22 partitions what would happen? Would the drive letter be 'CA:\'??

And yes, I do have a lot of time on my hands right now. (It's summer!)

 

[BoberFett]

Z: is the end

 

[Eli]

LOL ...
A:
B:
C:
D:
E:
F:
G:
...
Z:

 

[Shazam]

Hey, don't laugh. At work, I've almost run out of drive letters. It's actually very frustrating.

 

[rickn]

a:
c:
d:
e:
f:
g:
h:
i:
z:

 

[FaultCode]

Somehow my IS dept at work has enabled us to use D1-Z1.

 

[Hardware]

Win2000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[WoundedWallet]

This ain't funny!! That happened to me when a friend brought over his HD with 4 partitions in it. I had to disable one of my CDs.

So Faultcode, can you find out how they did it?

And Hardware, are you implying that W2k supports it? If so how do you do that?

Thanks,
WW

 

[Eug]

Yep, as boberfett said so clearly and succinctly, "Z: is the end". A friend has run out of letters, but he has a bazillion drives/letters for MP3 files.

I'm at a,c,d,e,f,g,h,m,p,y,z. Had a "b" as well, but I ditched that drive. (For the last few drives I've named them after the manufacturer because I had so many drive letters I couldn't remember where anything was anymore. )

 

[mAdD INDIAN]

Wow...I never thought people would experience that! So after I:\ it goes straight to Z:\? Or you can have letters in between?

I guess using 'subst' in your AUTOEXEC.BAT you can run out of drive letters..

So Win2k allows you to have infinite amounts of drive letters? What about WinME?

 

[Eug]

No, as you can see from my message you can have all the letters in between. But it's easier to set certain drives to certain letters if you wish. Ie. My zip drive is "Z", my Pioneer is "P", my Matsushita is "M", and my Yamaha is "Y". Much easier to remember that way.

 

[Mday]

i built this computer, so i remember.

 

[Bozo Galora]

theres a little dos utility that allows 30 drive letters

 

[Bozo Galora]

i scanned this from a book:


Partitioning a hard disk is the act of defining areas of the disk for an operating system to
use as a volume. To DOS, a volume is an area of a disk denoted as a drive letter; for example,
drive C is volume C, drive D is volume D, and so on. Some people think that you have to
partition a disk only if you are going to divide it into more than one volume. This is a
misunderstanding; a disk must be partitioned even if it will be the single volume C.

When a disk is partitioned, a master partition boot sector is written at cylinder 0, head 0,
sector 1--the first sector on the hard disk. This sector contains data that describes the
partitions by their starting and ending cylinder, head, and sector locations. The partition
table also indicates to the ROM BIOS which of the partitions is bootable and, therefore, where
to look for an operating system to load. A single hard disk can have 1 to 24 partitions. This
number includes all the hard drives installed in the system, which means that you can have as
many as 24 separate hard disks with one partition each, a single hard disk with 24 partitions,
or a combination of disks and partitions such that the total number of partitions is no more
than 24. If you have more than 24 drives or partitions, DOS does not recognize them, although
other operating systems may. What limits DOS is that a letter is used to name a volume, and the
Roman alphabet ends with Z--the 24th volume, when you begin with C.

 

[Crab cake]

FaultCode,

The D1 to Z1 drive designations you mentioned are not logical drives at all. They are search drive designations. It's a very handy way to navigate the DOS tree.