what if you have more than 26 drives?

[dhkkim]

i think there are only a:\~z:\ (26 reserved letter) for the drives.

so what happens if i get more than 26 drives?

wont work? ive already used about 20 including usb memory card reader.

 

[mechBgon]

Then mount them as directories in the NTFS file system instead of giving them drive letters. Easy to do, just log on as an Administrator, right-click My Computer > Manage > Disk Management. Now in the Disk Management window, right-click the drive of your choice, such as CD-ROM 1 or whatever, and use the Change Drive Letter & Path option. Remove the drive letter. Now do this again, and you can assign it a path instead of a drive letter.

 

[WobbleWobble]

Mount the drive to a folder rather than a drive letter.

 

[Nothinman]

Then mount them as directories in the NTFS file system instead of giving them drive letters. Easy to do, just right-click My Computer > Manage > Disk Management. Now in the Disk Management window, right-click the drive of your choice, such as CD-ROM 1 or whatever, and use the Change Drive Letter & Path option. Remove the drive letter. Now do this again, and you can assign it a path instead of a drive letter.

I know one of the filesystems has to be NTFS, the one holding the mount point, but does the other have to be NTFS too or will it work with FAT as well?

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Then mount them as directories in the NTFS file system instead of giving them drive letters. Easy to do, just right-click My Computer > Manage > Disk Management. Now in the Disk Management window, right-click the drive of your choice, such as CD-ROM 1 or whatever, and use the Change Drive Letter & Path option. Remove the drive letter. Now do this again, and you can assign it a path instead of a drive letter.

I know one of the filesystems has to be NTFS, the one holding the mount point, but does the other have to be NTFS too or will it work with FAT as well?

Good question. Let me give it a reality check using a CompactFlash card, assuming I can find one around here.

 

[WobbleWobble]

Works with FAT, I tested with my flash drive to my HDD.

 

[syborfical]

As far as I know / can remember it only works on NTFS drives (in windows 2000+)

-->Click on my computer manage
--->Disk management
--->Right click change drive letters and path

Then you can mount disk?s CD / DVD ?s as folders

I played a joke on a mate at a lan party and changed his
Extra partitions to mount under
DEV HDA HDB etc

He totally freaked out ..

You can have unlimited disks and stuff if you really wanted to.

 

[Nothinman]

It still sucks that the filesystem holding the mount point has to be NTFS, it's a limitation that I can't fathom as to why it would be there. But it's better than nothing I suppose. Now if they would only include a mount point editor in the installer so that you could mount places like Documents and Settings on seperate volumes at install time.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
It still sucks that the filesystem holding the mount point has to be NTFS, it's a limitation that I can't fathom as to why it would be there. But it's better than nothing I suppose. Now if they would only include a mount point editor in the installer so that you could mount places like Documents and Settings on seperate volumes at install time.

That's what I wanted in windows too. After having /home in linux mounted on a separate disk...

 

[Rilex]

You certainly can do that with an unattended install of Windows...

 

[nweaver]

what happens if you have more then 25 network mount points


I really detest windows directory structure after learning how/why *nix's work. It's so much more intuitive and makes more sense.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Rilex
You certainly can do that with an unattended install of Windows...

Care to explain / link? I would love to get all of \Documents and Settings\, not just My Documents, on a separate drive.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: nweaver
what happens if you have more then 25 network mount points


I really detest windows directory structure after learning how/why *nix's work. It's so much more intuitive and makes more sense.

Drive letters in Windows are legacy from Dos 1.0

If you are reaching 20+ drive letters you should probably be using mount points or perhaps spanned volumes.

If you are reaching 20+ mapped network drives you should seriously consider using DFS which is somewhat like *nix nfs but with redundancy.

As a general rule if you are getting that high in drive letters your infrastructure isn't really planned very well. This limitation was a problem back in NT 4.0 but that thing was released in like 1995 I think when it wasn't a big deal. Problem was solved in 2000.

Nothinman.. Yeah the standards for the FAT filesystem simply don't include that capability. As you know it's a pretty basic filesystem.

 

[Nothinman]

You certainly can do that with an unattended install of Windows...

I know, but I shouldn't have to go to all that trouble for one little thing that could be done very simply during the manual install.

Nothinman.. Yeah the standards for the FAT filesystem simply don't include that capability. As you know it's a pretty basic filesystem.

The filesystem's capabilities are irrelevant, I can mount a filesystem to a directory inside of a FAT filesytem just fine on Linux and probably any other unix that supports FAT.

 

[Smilin]

hm. I would be interested to see how the mount point works.

Does it render the directories unusable to other devices and OSs that can read FAT?

 

[Nothinman]

It's just a directory, the whole mount point thing is done in the VFS. Nothing special is required of either filesystem.

 

[nweaver]

is DFS supported in Debian? Thats what most of our fileservers run...

if you could map network drives to an ntfs folder, then I wouldn't mind. The point is, windows directory structure makes very little sense, and is one of the things NOT being fixed in vista.

 

[NogginBoink]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
It still sucks that the filesystem holding the mount point has to be NTFS, it's a limitation that I can't fathom as to why it would be there. But it's better than nothing I suppose. Now if they would only include a mount point editor in the installer so that you could mount places like Documents and Settings on seperate volumes at install time.

I can't fathom why anyone wouldn't use the NTFS filesystem. It is so superior to FAT in so many ways, that the only convincing argument I've heard to use FAT is to support dual-booting.

If you're running a machine on which you're dual-booting, you're not running a production server, and chances are really, really low that you're going to run into a 26 drive limitation.

 

[Nothinman]

is DFS supported in Debian? Thats what most of our fileservers run...

That would be a Samba thing not Debian, I don't know anything about DFS.

I can't fathom why anyone wouldn't use the NTFS filesystem. It is so superior to FAT in so many ways, that the only convincing argument I've heard to use FAT is to support dual-booting.

I agree, but that's beside the point.

If you're running a machine on which you're dual-booting, you're not running a production server, and chances are really, really low that you're going to run into a 26 drive limitation.

If it was that simple the thread wouldn't have come up.

 

[dhkkim]

so...

it only works in NTFS.
and i have to mount it to the directories.



hope it can be like 1:\,2:\, AA:\ BB:\...ZZZZ:\

 

[Woodie]

Why do you need a drive letter at all?
Just use the UNC name.
net use \\servername\sharename
(Same as adding to My Network Places, just w/o the drive letter assignment)

 

[Nothinman]

Why do you need a drive letter at all?
Just use the UNC name.
net use \\servername\sharename
(Same as adding to My Network Places, just w/o the drive letter assignment)

Because IME UNC paths generally perform worse than drive mappings.

 

[NogginBoink]

Originally posted by: Smilin
hm. I would be interested to see how the mount point works.

Does it render the directories unusable to other devices and OSs that can read FAT?

The mount point is implemented as a reparse point (which is why NTFS is required; FAT doesn't support reparse points). Your question doesn't make sense; the volume has to be NTFS... that in and of itself renders the directories unusable to other OSes that can only read FAT fileystems.

More info here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q205524

You can search Microsoft's site (particularly MSDN) if you want more low-level details of how reparse points work.

 

[Nothinman]

The mount point is implemented as a reparse point (which is why NTFS is required; FAT doesn't support reparse points). Your question doesn't make sense; the volume has to be NTFS... that in and of itself renders the directories unusable to other OSes that can only read FAT fileystems.

His question was directed at me because I asked why NTFS was required. I mentioned that in Linux no filesystem support is necessary to mount a fs inside of another and he asked if mounting a directory inside of a FAT fs would render the directory unreadable on another OS.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Why do you need a drive letter at all?
Just use the UNC name.
net use \\servername\sharename
(Same as adding to My Network Places, just w/o the drive letter assignment)

Because IME UNC paths generally perform worse than drive mappings.

In what way?