Any Way To Bypass 26 Drive Letters Limit For Hard Disks?
Feb 7, 2010
All of the drive letters of windows get finished and I need more than 26 driver letter for my hard disks and dvd-roms. Is there any possibility to add a fix for using more than 26 letters? For example : CC - DD - EE - FF - ...
I have two 1TB drives, each containing 4 partitions, used for backing up 4 computers. These drives are regularly switched between buildings as part of our backup strategy, always having one off-site. I have assigned drive letters M,N,O,P to respective partitions. When I swap the drives, the drive letters get reset and have to be manually reassigned. assigning the drive letters, including USBDM, but get no results.
Computers: HP Compaq 8200 Elite - CMT - 1 x Core i5 2500 / 3.3 GHz - RAM 4 GB - SSD 1 x 160 GB - DVD�RW (�R DL) / DVD-RAM - HD Graphics 2000 - Gigabit Ethernet - Windows 7 Professional 64-bit - Intel vPro Technology Docking Stations: ICY DOCK MB877SK Hard Drives: SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB
My hard drive crashed on my laptop. Before It crashed, It gave me a hard drive warning of imminent failure, and gave me an option to create recovery disks. I ended up creating 11 disks from the option. I installed the new hard drive and the BIOS reads that it will boot from the internal optical drive first. When I insert the first CD and start then computer, it continues to read "Operating system not found". When I look at the CD in another computer, it reads three files and one folder. The first file is an icon file which reads "Setup", the next is a "Media" bin file, and the last is an autorun setup information file. The last is a folder that contains various other backup files. My computer did not come with any copies of windows.
I am using 3 external hard drives and noticed a couple of times there drive letters have changed. Maybe I have had them unplugged for some reason I cannot remember, but it causes confusion with some files that use shortcuts. I would like to know if it is possible to give the drives permanent drive letters also change there names?
I like to listen to music loudly sometimes. I have both the volume mixer and my application's volume set to maximum levels, but it's not loud enough for my liking. Is there any way to increase the maximum sound volume in Windows 7?
I use a lot of different usb hard drives in my shop. I have two basic enclosures, a generic one that uses pata drives on a usb 2.0 cable and an Apricon USB SATA 2.0 adapter.Suddenly when I plug in a new drive device manager does see the drive and installs it in device manager. I can see the drive in Disk Management but it has no drive letter assigned, and therefore doesn't show up in Computer. I can easily just assign a letter in Disk Management and the drive immediately becomes usable. However, I would like to get Windows 7 to resume automatically assigning a drive letter.
I have tried a program called USB DriveCleanup. What it appears to have done is remove all installations of prior USB drives and when I plug in a drive that has been in the machine previously it then goes thru the install again. Yet still no drive letter. I think the program is doing what would manually be done by going into safe mode and cleaning out all the entries that build up there that don't appear in normal mode, then removes them. Basically it seems like a shortcut to manually doing it.
I also tried a registry fix that essentially asked me to delete the upper and lower filters. This seems similiar to fix for CD/DVD drives that no longer appear in Computer. This fix also didn't work.I tried removing and reinstalling the chipset drivers. Still no go.Running Windows 7 Pro SP1, H55 chipset.
Does Windows 7 have a limit on how many USB external hard drives it will use? We have 5 WD My Book 1TB drives; 4 of them are recognized and work just fine with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 (which we recently did a clean install of to replace Vista Home Premium 64), but the 5th one doesn't show up with a drive letter (in Computer or Windows Explorer), even though it does show up in Control Panel.
The one we are having trouble with has had the latest firmware and WD SmartWare installed, and our computer has the most current Dell BIOS installed. We know the drive works, because we can plug it into our other computer which has Windows XP on it and it comes up with a drive letter just fine. Just wondering if there's a limit on how many of these you can use with Windows 7, since we had no problem with the drive until we installed the new OS.
my problem is that sometimes when i turn on my computer i only have 1 dvd drive( i have 2 installed+3 other internal harddrives), and my primary disc that i have my os on. this does not happen when i use another harddrive with same os on, so i think it have to be driver sort of problem. they have never disappeared in bios, only in Windows 7 on 1 of the discs with os. does anybody know a fix for this? i really dont want to reinstall/wipe my disc. and i have both checked the cables an even switched them to new ones, still showing in bios but not in os. if it were only 1 drive i might consider it dying, but when it's 3 drives witch all pass chkdsk+dvd drive it must be something else? this is a almost new selfbuild pc so i know everything inside is OK.
I am getting ready to install windows 7 professional on my XP machine, I know I have to format the hard disk. If I have two hard drives and just copy everything from the drive I'm erasing to the other one and disconnect it during installation to make sure no data gets lost, will the second drive still work when I reconnect it after the install is finished? Both drives are IDE
Before I even go further: yes, the "hide empty drives" has been unchecked)I had to reinstall my machine and I was able to to see the drive letters for the internal flash card reader. However I think something might have gone wrong when I give my external HDD a drive letter that was held by one of the flash card reader).I wrote "I think" because I am not really sure since I never wanted to use the internal card reader till today so I never noticed there was an issue. Anyway, the internal card reader does not show up even when I insert a card in the reader. Basically nothing happens. I have uninstalled the "USB Mass storage device" and it gets installed without any issue but the problem is still there: I can't see the reader. the INTERNAL flash card reader has a USB slot and when I insert a EXTERNAL flash drive, the EXTERNAL flash drive shows up.
Being a laptop owner i was not happy to read this SSD laptop drives ‘slower than hard disks’
But are 40% more expensive
Solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming a more frequent storage component in laptops, and are promoted as being faster and more energy-efficient than traditional spinning hard drives. But tests prove that such drives are actually slower than standard laptop hard disks.
i'm going to go from 32 bit vista to 64 bit windows 7 and i want to know if files from my other hard disk that i use which doesn't contain any windows files or anything like that will be wiped when i'm installing it. also will it delete all of my files on the original C hard disk?
I have Windows 7 Ultimate installed on a Dell Optiplex GX620 P4 hyperthread, approx 6 years old. Bios is most current Phoenix ROM Bios Plus 1.10 A11. I have 2 sata drives and 2 IDE drives installed. Boot is from SATA 0. SATA drives 2&3 are not present. All is well with this part of the equation.I had been running a Seagate 250GB IDE drive (ST3250824A) as BIOS drive 4, master drive, jumper selected. I just installed a second 120gb Seagate IDE (ST3120026A) as a slave, BIOS drive 5. That was when things got interesting. When I rebooted BIOS took a long time to load, and then reported that neither IDE drive was present. I then did all the obvious things: Disconnected one drive at a time - BIOS would recognize the connected drive. Switched master & slave drive positions. Changed jumpering from master/slave to cable select. Installed a new ribbon cable. Checked that BIOS drive recognition was set to 'Auto' for both drives. Results are always the same: either drive is recognized when only one is connected but BIOS does not recognize them when both are installed. On boot I receive a warning that IDE Drives 4 & 5 are not present and have to press F1 to continue. When I enter Setup BIOS reports the drives as unknown drive type. When only one is connected BIOS accurately reports the drive model # & capacity.After going through all this,I decided to bring WIn 7 up and see what would happen. To my surprise, Windows 7 showed both drives and worked fine. Device Manager properly reported drive model & capacity. I have used the system in this configuration for several days and everything has worked fine.This is not a problem, per se, since other than slow booting and having to press F1 every time I boot to bypass the BIOS "error" notice the system works fine but I am curious if anyone else has had this problem, and if they found a solution. I have considered forcing a reinstall of the BIOS but since it isn't really broken I don't want to try to fix it and make things worse. I googled this problem before coming here and could not find anyone with an identical situation on any tech site. Can I be the only one who's ever had this happen?
Might not be a problem for a lot but I'm beginning to run out of letters for Networking disk drives on Windows systems. Once you start sharing multiple CD / DVD devices and multiple external devices (USB sticks, Ipods etc etc) and have may be 12 - 14 Virtual machines together with a decent TEST Bench set of real machines all up and running in a computer test lab this becomes a real pain.
Isn't it about time to get rid of the C: type nomenclenture (originated way back in the 8 bit Intel 8086 MS DOS days or even before).
Even the UNC system is pretty OK ( amemount) .
I'm not sure what type of change would be needed to the file system but IMO the change is LONG LONG overdue. Why on earth we are still stuck with this system which has been around "Since Pontius was a Pilot" I can't imagine.
It really wouldn't be a major problem to be compatable with earlier systems -- you could easily have a simple internal map say references to C: would be replaced by Mountpoint whenever the I/O was requested. Overhead would be very small.
(In any case it's really time to change the NTFS system -- but that's another topic entirely which would be a bit more complex).
Actually my computer is equipped with a 300GB drive as boot-device with two equal sized partitions on it to alternatively boot either Vista x64 (default at the moment) and Windows 7 x64 alternatively.
It depends on which OS I boot, how both partitions get drive letters assigned:
If I boot into Vista, the Vista partition gets drive letter C:, and the Windows 7 partition gets drive D:
If I boot into Windows 7, that partition gets drive letter C: and Vista will become the D: (Just switching)
But now I start to use EasyBCD 2.0, the Beta version, in Windows 7: After updating from Windows 7 Build 7100 to 7229 it shows me booting Vista from drive D: and Windows 7 from drive C:
Before I did the update, the regular EasyBCD 1.72 shows when Vista is booted, to boot Vista from drive C: and Windows 7 from drive D:
Is there anywhere out there a simple description on how the drive letters of startable devices are allocated?
Is it normal when installing Windows 7 that it installs itself on 'C' Drive and moves XP from 'C' Drive to 'D' Drive even though it appeared to be installing on 'D' during installation?
sing the same disk drive letters for more than three years. Suddenly the other day, when I started the computer many of the disk drive letters had changed. I used Computer Management to change them back to where they were but when I rebooted the computer, they had changed back to where they were before I made the changes
On my taskbar are five removable drives labelled H,W,X,Y and Z. I have no idea what storage device each of these drives is referring to. I would like to use the letter H to label a HDD. When I open disk management however (my computer>manage>disk management) none of the removable drives are shown.I have tried reading an assortment of USB sticks, phones and mp3 players but none of them show up as H. How can I change the drive letter of a removable drive?
Intel Core i7 CPU 950@3.07GHz 3.81GHz 12Gb RAM ATI Radeon HD 5770 Monitor 1 - BenQ2400W (Landscape) Monitor 2 - BenQ2400W (Portrait) Win 7 Pro 64bit: Epson Stylus Photo R1900.
On my taskbar are five removable drives labelled H,W,X,Y and Z. I have no idea what storage device each of these drives is referring to. I would like to use the letter H to label a HDD. When I open disk management however (my computer>manage>disk management) none of the removable drives are shown.I have tried reading an assortment of USB sticks, phones and mp3 players but none of them show up as H. How can I change the drive letter of a removable drive?
I had Windows installed to the first partition on my drive (which is C:) and after a few years now it's gotten full of software I don't use anymore and the like. Rather than install Windows over it and starting over, I decided to install to another partition and get everything set up before doing away with the old one.
I got Windows installed and mostly everything I use installed and working. My plan was to create an image of this copy and clone it back to the original partition. That was my plan until I realized I had screwed up majorly. The second installation of Windows says it's installed to F: (I'm not sure why, since I thought each version of Windows installed sees itself as C:). Maybe because I started the installation from the other copy of Windows instead of booting straight to the install CD.
Now my question is... Is there any way to make this copy think of the drive it's installed on as C: or will I be stuck cloning it to a drive labeled F:? Thinking about it, it doesn't seem possible considering everything is looking to F: instead of C: on this installation.
Here is an image of my drive setup. C: is the old copy (where I want F: to go) [URL]
I have two HDs; on the first one (80 GBs), I have four partitions, with XP on C: (and this is the boot drive), then D:, E:, and finally Vista on F:. I have another HD, a 1 TB one, which I use for storage, and I have made a lot of partitions on it, generally about 100 GB each. When I ran the setup for 7, I selected a partition on the second drive which was labelled S:. After 7 installed, and I opened My Computer, I saw that everything was messed up, and 7 was now on C:.
I know it doesn't mean it is physically on C:, it is still on the same partition of the second HD where I installed it, but it shows its partition as C:. I used Computer Management to change most of the drive letters so that they appear as they do in XP, but every time I try to change the drive letter of 7 from C: to S:, it gives an error, something about not allowed to change drive letter of system disk which has the pagefile.
So is it at all possible to force change the drive letters so that 7 is shown on S: and XP on C:. I opened C: (the 7 installation) and found many text files in system folders and program files which point to locations on C:, so if I force a change from C: to S:, what happens to all of these - do they automatically change their paths to S:, or does the whole thing just go phut!
I had the same problem when I installed Vista, but I didn't use it all that much, and so I didn't do anything about it, but I like 7, and unlike Vista which everyone said was an intermediate product until the next version came out, 7 is here to stay. I am ready to do another clean install if there is any way around this problem.
I have a general question about how windows assigns drive letters. My son has a Dell laptop with Windows 7. First of all, the card reader works fine. However, I thought the drive letter was always fixed for the sd card reader. When he inserts a micro sd card and adapter in the slot, it pops up the windows info box with the header stating Secure Digital Card F:/. All is well. When he inserts a different micro sd card and adapter in the same slot, it pops up the info box with the header Secure Digital Card G:/. I don't understand the different drive letters. These are identical 2gb micro sd cards. The reason I ask is we are writing an application that stores the sd card drive in a local sqlite database upon initialization of the application. If the drive is not consistent it basically messes up our application.
I use 3 USB sticks to backup data on a Win 7 machine
-Stick 1 does M,W,F -Stick 2 does Tu + Th -Stick 3 does Sun
I am having problems assigning them all to the same drive letter.I have tried assigning them individually in Disk Management to M: , which happens but as soon as the 2 of the sticks gets removed and put back in they go back to either H or G.I have looked at this thread and the registry fix didnt help either. Drive Letter - Add, Change, or Remove in Windows 7.I need all 3 sticks to be given the drive letter M and to keep it. (obv only 1 stick is in at a time.)
I just installed Win 7, clean install, on a second HD. On the original drive C:, I have Vista, on the new drive with Win 7, drive letter K:. This is all fine if I boot Vista but when I boot Win 7 (I use F12 with Dell) the drive letters are changed. K: becomes C: and C: becomes D:. When I tried to change the drive letters back so C: becomes K:, it will not let me. I spent most of the day setting up to install Win 7.
1. My machine has XP on a single hard drive w/ 3 partitions. In order to try Windows 7 the easiest thing for me to do is to install it on my E: partition. If I boot into Windows 7, do the drive letters change around or do the Windows 7 system files still show up as E:WINDOWS?
Are there any downsides to this installation that I don't know about? If I got tired of Windows 7 would it be a problem to get rid of the bootloader?
2. My original plan was to buy a second hard drive, install it by itself, and load Windows 7 onto it. Then reconnect the original hard drive and dual boot by changing the boot order in the BIOS. What does this do to the drive letters?
I would have one hard drive with 3 partitions and another hard drive with one partition. If I boot Windows 7 I'm guessing that its hard drive would become C: and the other hard drive would become D:, E: and F:. But what happens if I boot XP from the other hard drive? Does it stay C:, D: and E: and the second hard drive becomes F:, or do the letter scramble differently?