what happen if i run out of drive letters?

Question

my computer have a lot of local and network drivers which used all the drive letters. When I plug in a usb flash memory stick, I heard the system recognizes new hardware, but there is no additional drive appears to be relate to my flah memory stick?

Any way to solve this problem w/o deleting my current drive settings?

Answer 1

you can mount a disk partition as a directory under XP.(you can have it so that your flash drive will be a folder on you desktop)



1. Create a empty folder on your desktop (i will name it usbflash)
2.right click my computer and go to manage
3.on the left go to disk management
4.right click on your usb drive on the left
5.click on change letter and paths
6.press add
7.browse for the folder created on the desktop ie
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\USB flash
8. confirm the settings
9.Done!

your usb flash drive will now show on your desktop and all of your settings will stay intact.
update your post if you have any trouble.

Answer 2

Hi,
Unfortunatly, whenever you mount a new drive in windows, whether it is a hard disk, USB stick, or a card reader you need availible drive letters for them. there are a couple things you can do to solve this problem though, depending on how extensive your home network is.
First step would be to consider if you REALLY need all those drives in the first place. Why do you have so many drives? I can only think of 2 possibilities either you have a bunch of games cloned to a drive to avoid using the cds or you have a couple very large capacity hard disks and they are partitioned into many logical volumes (because i can not imagine anyone having 27 hard drives on one computer). If this is the case you might consider consolidating your data... for example if you have S:\ Movies T:\MP3s U:\MusicVideos you might consider combining them on one volume Named M:\MultiMedia and just creating subfolders in place of the drives that you had before.
If you would like to combine two or more hard disks so that they only use one drive letter, you might consider using a RAID. Or, you can (with XP and latest service pack) Mount a hard disk to an empty folder, thus eliminating the need for a drive letter.
If you have a network you might also consider spreading your data out on different computers and connecting to them using something like \\Computer01\Data Share.

I hope I could help you out a little.

Answer 3

You can only get 26 Letters: Drive A-Z. Once you hit Z, thats it.
You're going to have to temporarily unmap one of your network drives when using your flash stick. The flash stick needs to create a drive letter and assign it to the device while its plugged in.

Answer 4

That's windoz for you. That 26 drive letter thing is a legacy kludge. You can use hardware profiling to mount different drives during different logon sessions, but it requires you log out and back on, and that you not use more than 26 simultaneously