Ran out of Drive Letters - 26 max - Well not anymore :-)

Quander

Active member
Hey guys/ gals,

Before I got my new rig I had 15 Drives incl Hard Drive Partitions and Dvds so that coupled with my Virtual Drive and my Multi-media card slot in my Monitor had me letters pretty much maxed out.

So it was no wonder when I added all my old to my new Hard Drive and Multi-Media card slot in the new machine ran out of letters to allocate to drives.

So anytime I plugged in my Usb Flash or any External or SD cards I had to physically allocate a letter to it and unallocate it from somewhere else - which got a bit tiresome - that plus the fact I was planning to partition my new 1Tb HD as well.

So I did what I normally do when I want to find answers I JFGI

And I found an excellent article on Mounting Drives to NFTS Folders -

The only requirement is the drive you add the folder mount point to has to be:

1. Formatted in NFTS
2. Be empty

Rather than going through the whole procedure - I'm going to link the site as I do not think it can be made any easier than this

http://ask-leo.com/26_drives_is_there_a_way_around_the_26_drive_limit_in_windows.html

Also if you want to free up drives like A: and B: normally assigned for Floppy follow this registry fix :)

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/82994-drive-letter-add-change-remove-windows-7-a.html

Look at option two!

This worked a treat for me - now I have only 4 drive letters and for each partition I have mount points for. I tend to leave a letter for any partition where programs are installed, but all static data can be mounted. So now I can plug in my SD cards, Usb Flash Keys and External Drives and no more drive letter issue.

Btw the error on the Device Manager side was in the Portable Devices section with a yellow exclamation mark and "Problem with WPD FileSystem Volume Driver"

Hope it helps others :)
 
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