[ComfortGroup_IT]

I'm not sure where this should go since it seems to apply to any windows OS, but since it becomes a problem mainly with Mapped Network Drives I thought I would try posting it here.

Is there a way to have more than 26 drives? We have 30 separate Network drives in our network, I also have a hard drive, optical drive, zip drive, and sometimes one or more USB drives. While most of the people in the company only have access to 4 or 5 of the mapped drives, as network administrator I have access to all of them and need to access most if not all of them at least once in any given week. The problem is, there are only 26 letters in the alphabet So once I hit 26 drive letters (25 technically since it won't let me use "B") I have to un-map something to map a different one. Is there a way to have more than 26 drives?

[JohnWill]

There is no way to have more than 26 drive letters, it's a concrete limitation of Windows. It's actually pretty unusual to need that many drive letters, most applications can use a network path, i.e. //server/folder specification.

[ComfortGroup_IT]

Like I said, I would be the only one that would need that many as the server was setup with about 30 Shared folders that are mapped to the computer. Most employees only have security rights to 4 or 5 of the folders, but I have access to all of them (and apparently the individual that set them up didn't consider the need to manage all of them) add to that the Hard Drive enclosures for reading corrupted hard Drives (those that won't boot but still contain data that is retrievable), and thumb drives to transfer files to (many of the new ones show up as 2 drives, one for the files and one for the program the thumb drive runs, and this new card reader doesn't help since it lists as 5 different removable drives) and I am having to remap drives on a regular basis.

Can you set them as a location in "My Network Places" rather than a mapped drive? If so that would be great as I would be able to put the ones I don't use regularly there and keep my mapped drives for the few I need almost constant access to.

[JohnWill]

Yep, that's what I'm talking about. If you simply create shares on the server (I'm assuming this is not a domain server), you can then create network places for the ones for each user.

[ComfortGroup_IT]

what do you mean by a domain server? It is on the Active Directory domain, and once we get the new server running most of the folders will move to it (and the new server is our Global Catalog)

[JohnWill]

That's what I meant. Obviously, they have to login first in that case.