What will windows do if i have 27 drives in a PC?

[Maximilian]

Drive A#2 or would it just not work due to lack of letters?

 

[hhhd1]

try it, create some virtual drives or virtual cd drives
or partition a hd while setting each partition to be 100mb.

let us know.

 

[pauldun170]

Think drive letters are limited to 26 but you can mount drives in other ways. Directories\volumes or something like that.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663264(v=vs.85)

 

[cl-scott]

I did this way back in the Windows 3.1 days, and after you get to Z it starts over at AA, AB, AC, etc. Open a spreadsheet, look at the top row with the letters, and scroll out past Z, that's what you'll see in Windows assuming that core logic is the same as it was once upon a time.

 

[Maximilian]

I did this way back in the Windows 3.1 days, and after you get to Z it starts over at AA, AB, AC, etc. Open a spreadsheet, look at the top row with the letters, and scroll out past Z, that's what you'll see in Windows assuming that core logic is the same as it was once upon a time.

Ah, that sounds confusing, drive AZBF! They should number them instead.

 

[cl-scott]

Ah, that sounds confusing, drive AZBF! They should number them instead.

When you have a computer with that many drives, we can talk.

 

[Leros]

Think drive letters are limited to 26 but you can mount drives in other ways. Directories\volumes or something like that.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663264(v=vs.85)

This appears to be the right answer. It seems like there is a 26 drive limit in Windows.

http://ask-leo.com/26_drives_is_there_a_way_around_the_26_drive_limit_in_windows.html

 

[Red Squirrel]

I remember way back in the day one time my partition table got corrupted in such a way that I had thousands of little partitions. To this day I still have no idea WTF happened. I wont rule out a virus of some sort. I would just get an error at startup about more than 26 drives and windows would not boot. This was way back in the windows 98 days though. I would imagine the more modern windows OSes would see them all in disk manager just not in My Computer. You could then mount them to a folder like in Linux.

 

[Nothinman]

Drive A#2 or would it just not work due to lack of letters?

I think it just goes unmounted and you have to manually mount it to a directory on an NTFS partition. That's assuming the other drives are also NTFS since Windows limits mounting filesystems to only NTFS on NTFS for some unknown reason.

It would be a pretty simple, if time consuming, thing to test out with a VM or even just a disk image in a physical machine since Windows can mount them natively now too.

I did this way back in the Windows 3.1 days, and after you get to Z it starts over at AA, AB, AC, etc. Open a spreadsheet, look at the top row with the letters, and scroll out past Z, that's what you'll see in Windows assuming that core logic is the same as it was once upon a time.

I vaguely remember that too, but I don't think that misfeature carried over to any recent versions of Windows.

When you have a computer with that many drives, we can talk.

It's not such a feat once you factor in mapped drives, USB sticks, etc too.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'm actually curious, going to try it now.

 

[Red Squirrel]

FML. I chose GPT format, thought windows supported that. Need to redo this over again

 

[Red Squirrel]

Well this is what happens:



It just fills up what it can, the rest arn't mounted. Oddly, it also takes over the network drives but still shows it as being the network drive. Got an error at startup that it could not reconnect the drives. If I try to disconnect them now nothing happens.

I've seen Windows get confused like this before when a digital camera insisted on using a drive letter that was already used by the network.

Interestingly, drive A and B did not get used because of their history of being for floppy drives.

 

[Nothinman]

Well this is what happens:



It just fills up what it can, the rest arn't mounted. Oddly, it also takes over the network drives but still shows it as being the network drive. Got an error at startup that it could not reconnect the drives. If I try to disconnect them now nothing happens.

I've seen Windows get confused like this before when a digital camera insisted on using a drive letter that was already used by the network.

Interestingly, drive A and B did not get used because of their history of being for floppy drives.

I think you can manually use A and B, but yea, Windows gets confused very easily when it comes to network and USB drive assignments.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I've manually used A and B before and it works fine.

 

[StinkyPinky]

You would think after a decade of floppies being obsolete that Windows would at least free up the "B" drive as a standard drive assignment. Although you can do it manually of course.

 

[Nothinman]

You would think after a decade of floppies being obsolete that Windows would at least free up the "B" drive as a standard drive assignment. Although you can do it manually of course.

You would think that given the many, many better options used by most every other OS MS would have ditched the drive letter paradigm by now.

 

[hhhd1]

Ah, that sounds confusing, drive AZBF! They should number them instead.

Linux handle things a bit differently,

HD1 : sda
partitions: sda1, sda2, sda3, sda4, ....

HD2 : sdb
patitions: sdb1, sdb2, sdb3, sdb4, ....

One letter per drive, then partitions numbered,

so, the above suggests that there is a limit of 26 drive of type scsi/sata, and unlimited partitions.

 

[Red Squirrel]

You would think that given the many, many better options used by most every other OS MS would have ditched the drive letter paradigm by now.

Yeah it's odd they insist on doing it that way. Another thing I like about Linux is that their format is universal throughout the OS whether it's a local storage device, or remote, it's all treated the same.

In Windows not only do you have drive letters but you have UNC paths, which are often not supported by programs so if you need to do something special in a login script for instance you often need to temporarily mount the netlogon folder, then there's the whole issue of ensuring the letter is not taken by something else.

 

[Nothinman]

Linux handle things a bit differently,

HD1 : sda
partitions: sda1, sda2, sda3, sda4, ....

HD2 : sdb
patitions: sdb1, sdb2, sdb3, sdb4, ....

One letter per drive, then partitions numbered,

so, the above suggests that there is a limit of 26 drive of type scsi/sata, and unlimited partitions.

And your suggestion would be wrong. From sd.c:

* SCSI disk names starts at sda. The 26th device is sdz and the
* 27th is sdaa. The last one for two lettered suffix is sdzz
* which is followed by sdaaa.

And that's separate from the userland accessible filesystems mounted. I don't have time to track down how that's handled right now, but I'm sure it's >26.

 

[Red Squirrel]

And your suggestion would be wrong. From sd.c:



And that's separate from the userland accessible filesystems mounted. I don't have time to track down how that's handled right now, but I'm sure it's >26.

Yeah I managed to get 56 individual drives on a Linux box, and it just goes sdaa sdab sdac etc if I recall. It's kinda neat seeing that many individual hard drives on a Linux box and making the mother of all raid 0's with them. Was playing with an old FC SAN and the FC card displays all the drives individually to the OS which is nice.

 

[Ferzerp]

It works just fine with mount points instead of drive letters.

They can't ditch drive letters for legacy compatibility. Anyone who needs more than 26 volumes should be using mount points anyway though. They work exactly like *nix mount points.

 

[Nothinman]

It works just fine with mount points instead of drive letters.

They can't ditch drive letters for legacy compatibility. Anyone who needs more than 26 volumes should be using mount points anyway though. They work exactly like *nix mount points.

I find it funny that your two first statements are contradictory. How can it work just fine with mount points if MS won't ditch drive letters for compatibility? I can understand keeping C:\ as a reference to the system volume, but everything else can be a mount point and no app really cares. Some get confused about drive space because they assume 1 volume per-letter and that each directory on a drive has the same free/used space as the root drive, but that's a bug in that app that should be fixed.

And sadly, they don't work exactly like unix mount points. They're close, but you're restricted to NTFS so it really can't apply to thumb drives until MS removes that restriction. Linux lets me mount any filesystem anywhere and I don't see a reason for Windows not to be able to do the same.

 

[hhhd1]

And your suggestion would be wrong. From sd.c:

* SCSI disk names starts at sda. The 26th device is sdz and the
* 27th is sdaa. The last one for two lettered suffix is sdzz
* which is followed by sdaaa.

And that's separate from the userland accessible filesystems mounted. I don't have time to track down how that's handled right now, but I'm sure it's >26.

I Stand corrected.

 

[piasabird]

What is the point of such a theoretical discussion? Why would someone want that many drives? Probably in a server you can join many drives into a volume. They must do something different on giant servers like IBM has for Super computers. I dont have a motherboard with 27 SATA connectors so unless this is like a giant blade server or some high technology device the discussion is pointless. Lets say you had 2 TB drive X 26, that would be like 52 TB of files. Unless you are storing all the financial data at the SSN office what would use that for? However, obviously they have some kind of megasystem.

You could read this higher level explanation, but it does not answer the nuts and bolts. The simple answer is that large supercomptuers that consist of rows and rows of computers use a different archetecture. They dont use windows per se.

http://www.explainthatstuff.com/how-supercomputers-work.html

Read this and you will not be that much smarter. The subject is more complex than Microsoft Windows.

I would assume that the exact specifications for large computer systems are considered trade secrets. Just imagine buing 8 processors for one motherboard and then having Thousands of those motherboards. How many can you stackup in a 6 or 8 foot computer system then what if you had a row of 20 or 30 of these and then maybe 10 or 20 rows all wrapped up into one gigantic super-computer the size of a football field.

 

[Nothinman]

What is the point of such a theoretical discussion? Why would someone want that many drives?

Why not? There are dozens of artificial limitations in computers that need to be broken or eliminated eventually and the first step towards that end is discussion like this.

They must do something different on giant servers like IBM has for Super computers. I dont have a motherboard with 27 SATA connectors so unless this is like a giant blade server or some high technology device the discussion is pointless. Lets say you had 2 TB drive X 26, that would be like 52 TB of files. Unless you are storing all the financial data at the SSN office what would use that for? However, obviously they have some kind of megasystem.

They're smart enough not to run Windows. Besides working with Windows, IBM also develops their own mainframe system, AIX and Linux.

And 52TB isn't really that much these days, you can easily fill that with a few dozen VMs, snapshots, etc today. We've got several small business clients with SANs that already hold between a quarter and half of that.

You could read this higher level explanation, but it does not answer the nuts and bolts. The simple answer is that large supercomptuers that consist of rows and rows of computers use a different archetecture. They dont use windows per se.

No one serious about systems that large run Windows. The top500 lists only 2 systems registered running Windows and they're so far down the list it's funny.

The subject is more complex than Microsoft Windows.

But this discussion is about Windows. There has been some digression about how other systems don't have those limitations, but the primary subject is still Windows and it's stupid filesystem naming convention.