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As we know that in Windows the partition location is prefixed with [a-z]:, what if there're more than 26 partitions?

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Are you experiencing a real, practical problem that needs resolving? – Linker3000 Jun 7 '11 at 12:06
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@Linker3000 Does it matter? – kivetros Jun 7 '11 at 14:19
@kivetros, it kinda does. Faq says "You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face." I'm curious as well, but dislike opening up SU to these "I wonder..." type questions. – hyperslug Jun 7 '11 at 20:54
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Don't forget that hard drive partitions aren't the only things that use drive letters. So do removable media (floppies, CD-ROMs, flash drives). And so do mapped network drives, which are numerous in the workplace. That's what makes the 26-drive letter limit a practical problem. – user46971 Jun 7 '11 at 22:58
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@hyperslug I see your reasoning and I do agree, but I feel as if this question might have some real value for someone at some point; it's not a "what if / I wonder if"-type question, IMO. Remember that the overarching goal of SE is to contain as many good questions and good answers as possible. – kivetros Jun 8 '11 at 14:23
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up vote 38 down vote accepted

The drive letters you see are simply representations of the physical partitions available and can be represented by other means. You could only have up to 26 drive letters, but you are definitely able to have (and actually use) many more partitions.

In that case, you could link the drive to a directory on your system rather than a drive letter as, since Windows XP at least (and potentially earlier), it has been possible to mount a drive or partition under a directory in Windows. This would mean you could effectively have a folder containing all your drives that are not accessible by drive letter.

You would do this within the Disk Management administrative console.

To get to the console, go to (or right-click on "My Computer" -> "Manage" -> "Disk Management"):

Start > Run and type
diskmgmt.msc

If you right click a partition you would see a Change Drive Letter or Path option which where you can add or remove paths or drive letters for drives.

Mount in drive

As a side not you will want to make sure that the folder that you are using is empty, when you mount a partition to that folder then you will only see the files and folders from that partition and any original files will be invisible. I suspect if you unmount the drive from that folder you will be able to see the original files again, but I don't know for certain.

Weird, I assumed that there would be some kind of limit on how many logical partitions you can have in an extended partition, but I can't actually find anything about it. I know you can only have four primary partitions.

This is an example drive that I have removed the drive letter from and instead assigned to a folder, the files on that drive are now accessible at C:\Temp\Test and the drive no longer has a letter assigned to it:

Enter image description here

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Logical partitions are implemented as a linked list, so there is no theoretical limit to the number you can have. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Jun 7 '11 at 8:25
@Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams,what's their symbolic name like when 26 letters are used up? – winuser Jun 7 '11 at 8:26
You can't have more than 26 letters, period. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Jun 7 '11 at 8:28
@Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams ,26 logical partitions need 26 letters at least,right? What about the 27th partition? – winuser Jun 7 '11 at 8:29
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@Winuser, the 27th partition would not be able to have a drive letter and so you would have to assign it to a folder as I mentioned in my answer. The Disk Management console allows you to see unassigned partitions and then assign them to a folder as necessary. Have a look at i.technet.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC235918.png for an example of what you would see. – Mokubai Jun 7 '11 at 8:35
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up vote 6 down vote

Under DOS 3.3 at least you could get drives like [:\ i.e .the ASCII characters after Z.

This was using Novell and setting LASTDRIVE to some high letter.

So there might be a way of getting the 27th partition to have a character name.

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Still can be done in WinNT using subst (which calls DefineDosDevice()), but most GUI programs won't recognize [:\Users and the like :( – grawity Jun 7 '11 at 10:32

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