Drive Letters

unnameduser

Hypothetical situation ...

If i had 32 drives connected to my computer how would windows assign drive letters to all of them given that there are 26 letters in the alphabet...

Will it use a combination of letters, numbers.

Cheers in advance

fletch

I've no idea....map a load of network drives and see.

Kimbot

You can't as far as I am aware!!

unnameduser

I imagine there must be some way, as striped and spanned volumes allow up to 32 disks.

Kimbot

Best bet is get a second HDD and partition it into 32 spaces and see what happens!!

Hagar

I don't think you can even have 26. I think 24 is the max as A and B are assigned to floppies.

As for striped and spanned disks you have crossed over there into the realms of vitual vs physical disks. An array of striped disks is treated as if it were a single physical disk which for all intents and purposes they are. The disks in an array can't be used individually. They only have value as a complete set.

feylya

You could use NTFS mount points instead

unnameduser

So if i were to split a disk into 32 volumes, it would run out of letters and not assign drive letters to all of them.

Ginger

From technet

In Windows 2000, each clustered disk had to have a drive letter assigned to it, therefore the maximum number of clustered disks in a single cluster was limited to 23 volumes (26 letters of the alphabet minus A and B [Floppy drives] and C [system/boot drive]).

In Windows Server 2003, there is no longer a requirement for a clustered disk to have a driver letter assigned, therefore the number of disks is limited by the number that can be physically attached and the number supported by the underlying operating system.

Note:
Applications can access disks with no drive letters in one of two ways a) directly using the object name associated with the disk or more likely b) by using mount points to link multiple disks together that can be accessed using a single drive letter.

So following from there.. you can still have more than 26 disks except some will be mounted as folders eg

You have disks label C-> Z

You add a new disk.. You format it and then you mount it as Z:\C1 so that you now access it through Z:\C1

And so on .. you can keep adding disks as long as you have mount points

Conversely you could have 32 disks all mounted via mount points to give you a c:\DiskA -> c:\DiskZ+++



Also you could possible access it through \\device(X)\harddisk(x)

Dorsanty

Won't work,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(computing)#Extended

Although the article suggests what might happen in the future if they do decide to handle this case. But for now it looks like windows will only see the partition but won't mount it / assign a letter automatically. Only way around it then would be to run NTFS and use the ability to mount to folders.


It's a good question but I defy anyone to require more then 24 drive letters to place data on. You really need to look at what you are doing when you hit that limit. If it's just a search for greater capacity then it's time to use raid solutions. Otherwise you may need to a more UNIX based OS.


I once did a setup where windows ran off one disk and 'program files' folder ran off a faster drive with larger cache. Idea being that with program files separate from the main windows drive, I've separated the IO of loading a program from reading / writing to the page file. Was a bit of trouble to setup.

unnameduser

cool that clears that up.

Im not trying anything like this but it's a question that popped to mind when doing some reading.

Cheers folks

Ginger

Dorsanty wrote:

Won't work,
I once did a setup where windows ran off one disk and 'program files' folder ran off a faster drive with larger cache. Idea being that with program files separate from the main windows drive, I've separated the IO of loading a program from reading / writing to the page file. Was a bit of trouble to setup.

Thats the way my OS is normally setup. Base OS is on its own disk, My docs on a different one and program files on a seperate one. Purely for backup and recovery options. If I format my OS drive, i dont loose my docs or anything like that.

unnameduser

on another note.


Hypothetical situation again...One computer running XP on a single basic disk.

If i was running windows on one primary partition on a basic disk and upgraded the disk to a dynamic disk. Voila, One volume.

If I decided I wanted a multiboot setup I would need to change back to basic.

Can I downgrade to dynamic without losing my O.S? I dont think i can. I ask this because it seems by default that reverting from dynamic to basic causes all data to be lost.