One possible solution to running out of drive letters.

Over the last 12 months or so I have been battling with a shortage of letters in the alphabet. I sought support from here and had some excellent responses (thanks to those people).

Nothing really seemed to do just what I wanted, but yesterday I found something that I thought I should share, just in case someone else might find it useful.

I refer of course to Symbolic Links. I also use libraries across the network locations. Now I have the best of both worlds.

I have a windows 2008 server (though the OS is largely irrelevant in my situation). It contains 8 x 2TB drives. I use a server because it also runs a website, WSUS, DB servers (SQLLITE and Firebird), Coldfusion server and various other bits and pieces.

There are a total of 28 partitions across the 8 drives. I realise I could have used raid to combine these drives and reduce the number of partitions, but that would have simply shifted the problem from partition to folder.

The command to create the symlinks is

mklink /d <link> <target>

/d is used because /J requires that the symlinks be local to the target, and /H is typically not supported for directories.

There is one gotcha though. You might see an error message saying that the link cannot be followed. To fix this,

fsutil behavior set SymlinkEvaluation L2L:1 R2R:1 L2R:1 R2L:1

Where R=Remote, and L=Local. This command enables symlinks for all 4 scenarios.

So, in my case, I had 4 separate drives of 2tb each called movies, documentaries, TV shows and Home Made. Previously I had 4 mapped drives, now I have one. When I click movies I see the links to the other three.

Yes, shortcuts could have been used, but they have their own idiosyncrasies.

Hopefully, this might help someone else...

Tanya