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

Page 3 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

Alciel

Honorable
Nov 9, 2013
203
0
10,690
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?
 
Solution
Partitioning is the wrong way to do it.

For instance, Disk 4....3TB
anime, anime, pictures, videos, music, skype, Logs, Firefox, Movies I, JDownloader
Why does FireFox have its own partition? What happens when that reaches 79GB? Pain will ensue.

That should literally be just Folders on that drive.

"Fixing" this would be a major pain.

Here's what you do:
Remove the I and K drive letters from those little partitions
Buy another 4TB drive
Give it drive letter Z
Starting with Disk 4, create folders on this new drive, corresponding to each partition on Disk 4.
anime, anime, pictures, videos, music, skype, Logs, Firefox, Movies I, JDownloader

Copy the data from partition Anime1 to the folder Anime1 on this new drive.
Repeat...
I really am curious what gave you the idea to do this? This looks to me like cooking dinner, then cutting up the steak in 20 parts, putting them all in a separate plate, then doing the same thing with the potatoes and bringing 40 plates to eat off to the table. I don't think in my 30 years of working with computers I have ever run across a system setup this way.



 

Alciel

Honorable
Nov 9, 2013
203
0
10,690
Well to be completely honest, I thought that partitioning was the way to go, Clearly I was wrong and Now I'm trying to fix that.

It seems that my most recent question was overlooked.

Could someone please help me with my last question that I posted?