How many letter drives can Windows Have? What to do when you run out?

[Alciel]

Just a quick question about Windows 7 and 10, I plan to be upgrading to Windows 10 sometime next week.

My only problem is that I have a of partitioned drives, So I want to know if there's a letter drive limit on Windows, And if there is what do I do about it when I reach the limit?

Right now I'm on Windows 7 and currently I have 23 letter drives, I'm not sure why but I also have 2 letter drives that I think aren't useful, Letter drive (I) only has 7.99MB with 4.08MB Free and Letter Drive (K) has 99.9MB with 82.3MB free, I'm not sure they are used for or if they do anything at all, My OS right now is on letter drive (C) but that's not partitioned, I originally thought that I and K were part of C because of my OS, Turns out that's not the case.

If I run out of Letters will I not be able to partition anymore?

 

[Alciel]

What do you think of the two 4TB drives that I said I was looking into? Would those be good?

This is mostly for a Plex server but other things as well.

Sure.
Fix the partitioning first, before Plex.

Will do, I'm already starting now, When I get my SSD I'll install windows 7 then upgrade to windows 10. Then merge the partitions after I move the files to a safe place.

 

[Alciel]

I moved all the files that I wanted to keep to another Drive, And I have since then reformatted it and used AOMIE to merge the partitions. But I now have two different programs telling me different things, I have Windows Disk Manager showing me that my Drive was wiped but the partitions are still there. On the other hand AMOIE is showing me that the drive I reformatted and merged is back to being one giant drive.

I'm not sure what to believe.

Did I do something wrong? Can I carry on with this or not?

 

[USAFRet]

You're looking at 2 different drives.
Disk 1 and Disk 0

 

[Alciel]

They are one in the same, I'm not sure why its showing like that.

 

[USAFRet]

They are one in the same, I'm not sure why its showing like that.

Disk 1 and Disk 0 are two different physical drives.

 

[Alciel]

But I only have one 1.5Tb drive in my system. Although for some reason it shows different capacity's.

AOMIE has different named Drives but both the managers add up to 6 Drives.







***EDIT***

Windows Manager has 1397.26Tb

While

AOMIE has 1.36Tb listed

I'm not sure why that is, its supposed to be a 1.5Tb Drive.

 

[USAFRet]

FOr a foolproof verification, this is what I would do

Power off
Disconnect ALL drives except the C drive, and whichever one you are manipulating right now
Power up
See what happens

Repeat with each drive as you go.
Work with only one problematic drive at a time.

 

[Alciel]

I clicked best answer by accident again in the email that the forum sent

I found out how to get my harddrive back to its 1397Tb capacity, I didn't know you could use Windows Disk Manager to do so.

What I did was delete the volumes from the drive, Like I had D, E, H, G. I deleted all the volumes then I went to the main disk and right clicked and choose extend volume which I did for all of the ones that I deleted and the Extend Volume wizard opened and I selected all the free space I had for the drive that I was going to put back to full capacity.

It put the drive back to what it was when I bought it. So it worked out for me.

 

[USAFRet]

Best Answer undone. Again...

 

[Alciel]

I have run into a problem when trying to add the deleted partition space back to my drive. Granted the drive I'm trying to do this to is a seagate external desktop expansion drive. I'm not sure if I can restore the space that I partitioned back to the main drive. Unless I am doing something wrong. When I try to add the deleted partitioned back to my drive (Anime :N) it gives me the error that the operation is not supported by the product.

My product that I'm trying to do this to is an older model Seagate Desktop Expansion Drive (STBV3000100)

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-STBV3000100/dp/B00834SJU8/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1468723593&sr=1-4&keywords=seagate+external&refinements=p_n_feature_two_browse-bin%3A5446815011

 

[wlp]

OK..you HAVE to show us a screencap of your Disk Management window.

How many physical drives is this?

Bottom line, though, it is really only 24 drive letters. Yes, there are 26 letters in the alphabet, but you're not supposed to use A & B in any current system.

 

[wlp]

HI, you state that drive letters A: and B: "should not be used in any current system". Can u pls explain "why not"? I have a comp without diskette drive, and I assigned A: to a disk partition long time ago. It never caused me any problems.

 

[USAFRet]

HI, you state that drive letters A: and B: "should not be used in any current system". Can u pls explain "why not"? I have a comp without diskette drive, and I assigned A: to a disk partition long time ago. It never caused me any problems.

You can, but it won't be indexed.
http://www.howtogeek.com/122891/what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used-for/

 

[wlp]

In my case that's fine. My A: drive only contains very large archives with data from previous years, and I access these archives only very occasionally.

 

[johnbl]

you can mount partitions from secondary drives to a subdirectory of another drive:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753321(v=ws.11).aspx
this method will free up your drive letters so you can use the network redirector and connect to shares.
(you need free drive letters to make the connections)

or maybe junctions like this:
http://lifehacker.com/5986883/how-to-combine-multiple-hard-drives-into-one-volume-for-cheap-high-capacity-storage

 

[BadActor]

Totally irrelevant nowadays, but drive letters A and B were used to signify floppy drives.

 

[Michael Trenton]

Is this me just imagining things or isn't there a way to make drives use two letters (like AB, DE, etc)??
I seem to remember from the place I worked a decade ago that they used to do this when running out of drive letters. Or am I simply remembering things wrong?

 

[johnbl]

not with microsoft software, it would break a lot of functions that were designed in the dark ages

Is this me just imagining things or isn't there a way to make drives use two letters (like AB, DE, etc)??
I seem to remember from the place I worked a decade ago that they used to do this when running out of drive letters. Or am I simply remembering things wrong?

 

[Michael Trenton]

not with microsoft software, it would break a lot of functions that were designed in the dark ages

Is this me just imagining things or isn't there a way to make drives use two letters (like AB, DE, etc)??
I seem to remember from the place I worked a decade ago that they used to do this when running out of drive letters. Or am I simply remembering things wrong?

Okay, so the double drive letters I'm remembering was probably due to the server being Linux based or something like that then? We were running Windows XP on our workstations though and it seemed to work okay.

Isn't it about time Microsoft did something to fix those design mistakes they made in the dark ages btw?

 

[johnbl]

They were not mistakes at the time, more like design "choices" but the whole operating system is riddled with them.
I would expect that is why windows 10 will be the last version. I would expect they are making something from scratch

each generation of windows had to inter-operate with previous versions so you have a lot of legacy code that forced the design of the new version of the software.
6 dos versions, early os/2 versions *1.1 and 2.0) and the IBM versions of os/2., windows 3, windows 95, windows 98, early NT versions (3.5 , and 4), xp versions, vista versions, windows 7, windows 8 and now windows 10 plus all the networking versions started from the old msnet code, then lanman 1 lanman 2 and all of the oem versions (were folded into windows 3 and NT)

windows today still lives with the design choices and limits of early DOS versions and its networking MSNET.
DOS could only have 26 drive letters Max, and by default you got A thru F unless you changed the defaults.
and certain file names were reserved and they still are today.

you could strip the system down to fit in a much smaller footprint but you would still have the limits. Better to start over with modern design choices and new limits.

pretty messy evolution.

not with microsoft software, it would break a lot of functions that were designed in the dark ages

Is this me just imagining things or isn't there a way to make drives use two letters (like AB, DE, etc)??
I seem to remember from the place I worked a decade ago that they used to do this when running out of drive letters. Or am I simply remembering things wrong?

Okay, so the double drive letters I'm remembering was probably due to the server being Linux based or something like that then? We were running Windows XP on our workstations though and it seemed to work okay.

Isn't it about time Microsoft did something to fix those design mistakes they made in the dark ages btw?

 

[USAFRet]

IMHO, if you need 20+ drive letters, you're doing it wrong.

 

[Michael Trenton]

They were not mistakes at the time, more like design "choices" but the whole operating system is riddled with them.
I would expect that is why windows 10 will be the last version. I would expect they are making something from scratch

each generation of windows had to inter-operate with previous versions so you have a lot of legacy code that forced the design of the new version of the software.
6 dos versions, early os/2 versions *1.1 and 2.0) and the IBM versions of os/2., windows 3, windows 95, windows 98, early NT versions (3.5 , and 4), xp versions, vista versions, windows 7, windows 8 and now windows 10 plus all the networking versions started from the old msnet code, then lanman 1 lanman 2 and all of the oem versions (were folded into windows 3 and NT)

windows today still lives with the design choices and limits of early DOS versions and its networking MSNET.
DOS could only have 26 drive letters Max, and by default you got A thru F unless you changed the defaults.
and certain file names were reserved and they still are today.

you could strip the system down to fit in a much smaller footprint but you would still have the limits. Better to start over with modern design choices and new limits.

pretty messy evolution.

Yes I guess that makes sense. So that's what they meant when they said Windows 10 would be the last version then?

 

[johnbl]

I would think so, I expect they have some version being worked on currently and it just has not been announced.
Too many people start complaining. Look at window RT and all of the other microsoft efforts to move from a intel based PC. (mips, alpha and powerPC versions of NT)

windows must die before any one would let them get away with making large changes.

They were not mistakes at the time, more like design "choices" but the whole operating system is riddled with them.
I would expect that is why windows 10 will be the last version. I would expect they are making something from scratch

each generation of windows had to inter-operate with previous versions so you have a lot of legacy code that forced the design of the new version of the software.
6 dos versions, early os/2 versions *1.1 and 2.0) and the IBM versions of os/2., windows 3, windows 95, windows 98, early NT versions (3.5 , and 4), xp versions, vista versions, windows 7, windows 8 and now windows 10 plus all the networking versions started from the old msnet code, then lanman 1 lanman 2 and all of the oem versions (were folded into windows 3 and NT)

windows today still lives with the design choices and limits of early DOS versions and its networking MSNET.
DOS could only have 26 drive letters Max, and by default you got A thru F unless you changed the defaults.
and certain file names were reserved and they still are today.

you could strip the system down to fit in a much smaller footprint but you would still have the limits. Better to start over with modern design choices and new limits.

pretty messy evolution.

Yes I guess that makes sense. So that's what they meant when they said Windows 10 would be the last version then?

 

[slingsrat]

not with microsoft software, it would break a lot of functions that were designed in the dark ages

Is this me just imagining things or isn't there a way to make drives use two letters (like AB, DE, etc)??
I seem to remember from the place I worked a decade ago that they used to do this when running out of drive letters. Or am I simply remembering things wrong?

So what's the point of GPT with 128 possible partitions on a disk if I can only assign 26 drive letters?

 

[USAFRet]

not with microsoft software, it would break a lot of functions that were designed in the dark ages

Is this me just imagining things or isn't there a way to make drives use two letters (like AB, DE, etc)??
I seem to remember from the place I worked a decade ago that they used to do this when running out of drive letters. Or am I simply remembering things wrong?

So what's the point of GPT with 128 possible partitions on a disk if I can only assign 26 drive letters?

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn640535(v=vs.85).aspx
Windows and GPT FAQ
"Each basic partition can be mounted using a drive letter or mount point, other volume device object, or both. "