Erm....Win7 HDD limit?

[KyleGates]

SO here's a quick question. I have a PC running Windows 7 hp 32bit. I have 2 internal Hard Drives a DVD Drive and 6 external drives. The system only sees 5 of the externals though. Is there a limit to how many external drives can be read by the OS?

Edit- Well, got a little somewhere. In Disk Management the drive was disabled, once I re-enabled it, it would still give an error when I tried to give it a drive letter but if I then exited the disk managment area, it would automatically get a drive letter and be usable. Odd.

 

[RebateMonger]

You'll run out of drive letters at "Z:". A common reason that disks don't show up is if they've been assigned a drive letter that conflicts with a mapped Network drive letter.

 

[boran]

you can see if the drive is connected by going into disk management.
Right click on "computer" in the start menu and select "manage".
There you can go to "disk management" under "storage"

there you can see the disks initialize and format, assign/change drive letters etc.

 

[imagoon]

Last I recall the volume limit was around 256 or so. You only have 26 drive letters but you can mount disks to the NTFS directory structure like you do in Linux.

 

[piasabird]

You are more limited by the total number of connections you have to connect drives to.

It seems like the more drives you connect the more crowded and busy your resources will be to try to start up and keep track of and access all the drives.

Some motherboards will give you problems if you mix the type of drives up between IDE and SATA and PATA. I am all for a system with SATA only. Then there are the USB connected drives.