Windows Without Drive Letters

[Jeff Gaines]

During the course of my post about a NAS/attached storage I said I had
managed to maintain the drive letters on my external drive.

I could scrap drive letters and just use URLs in Win 10 apparently by
mounting each drive in an NTFS directory.

I know Linux and Mac OS does that anyway. Anybody actually used it in
Windows? Any pros/cons? Would it work with drives on my attached storage?

[Andy Burns]

Post by Jeff Gaines
During the course of my post about a NAS/attached storage I said I had
managed to maintain the drive letters on my external drive.
I could scrap drive letters and just use URLs

you might mean UNC paths to your NAS?

Post by Jeff Gaines
in Win 10 apparently by
mounting each drive in an NTFS directory.

That's been "a thing" since NT4, and probably NT3.5x as well
I've used it without any problems, might confuse some people when a
directory, rather than a drive gives errors about having no free space.

Post by Jeff Gaines
I know Linux and Mac OS does that anyway. Anybody actually used it in
Windows? Any pros/cons? Would it work with drives on my attached storage?

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Andy Burns

Post by Jeff Gaines
During the course of my post about a NAS/attached storage I said I had
managed to maintain the drive letters on my external drive.
I could scrap drive letters and just use URLs

you might mean UNC paths to your NAS?

Indeed, that might explain why Google wasn't really my friend!

Post by Andy Burns

Post by Jeff Gaines
in Win 10 apparently by mounting each drive in an NTFS directory.

That's been "a thing" since NT4, and probably NT3.5x as well
I've used it without any problems, might confuse some people when a
directory, rather than a drive gives errors about having no free space.

OK, thanks :-}

I'll have a go on a spare machine and see how it feels.

[Theo]

Post by Jeff Gaines
During the course of my post about a NAS/attached storage I said I had
managed to maintain the drive letters on my external drive.
I could scrap drive letters and just use URLs in Win 10 apparently by
mounting each drive in an NTFS directory.
I know Linux and Mac OS does that anyway. Anybody actually used it in
Windows? Any pros/cons? Would it work with drives on my attached storage?

I believe some Windows APIs don't work with UNC paths, so some apps don't
accept them.

Theo

[Daniel James]

Post by Theo
I believe some Windows APIs don't work with UNC paths, so some apps don't
accept them.

There are certainly programs that aren't aware of UNC paths, and so
reject perfectly valid names. Whether that's the programs trying to do
strict checking of pathnames and getting it wrong or failure of the APIs
I'm not sure.

[Philip Herlihy]

Post by Daniel James

Post by Theo
I believe some Windows APIs don't work with UNC paths, so some apps don't
accept them.

There are certainly programs that aren't aware of UNC paths, and so
reject perfectly valid names. Whether that's the programs trying to do
strict checking of pathnames and getting it wrong or failure of the APIs
I'm not sure.

You may be able to get round this by generating a 'virtual' drive letter using
the SUBST command-line operation.

[SH]

Post by Philip Herlihy

Post by Daniel James

Post by Theo
I believe some Windows APIs don't work with UNC paths, so some apps don't
accept them.

There are certainly programs that aren't aware of UNC paths, and so
reject perfectly valid names. Whether that's the programs trying to do
strict checking of pathnames and getting it wrong or failure of the APIs
I'm not sure.

You may be able to get round this by generating a 'virtual' drive letter using
the SUBST command-line operation.

SUBST? thats a MS DOS command surely... thats certainly a blast from the
past....

Didn't think it still existed in Windows 11?

[Richard Kettlewell]

Post by Daniel James

Post by Theo
I believe some Windows APIs don't work with UNC paths, so some apps don't
accept them.

There are certainly programs that aren't aware of UNC paths, and so
reject perfectly valid names. Whether that's the programs trying to do
strict checking of pathnames and getting it wrong or failure of the
APIs I'm not sure.

I found that Lightroom[1] misbehaved in some way I can’t remember when
using a UNC path. It was easily solved by making Z: point to the same
place and telling Lightroom to use that. (Curiously Lightroom then
displays the corresponding UNC path as well.)

[1] the ancient pay-once version which is still shambling on just about
well enough for me to use.

[SH]

Post by Theo

Post by Jeff Gaines
During the course of my post about a NAS/attached storage I said I had
managed to maintain the drive letters on my external drive.
I could scrap drive letters and just use URLs in Win 10 apparently by
mounting each drive in an NTFS directory.
I know Linux and Mac OS does that anyway. Anybody actually used it in
Windows? Any pros/cons? Would it work with drives on my attached storage?

I believe some Windows APIs don't work with UNC paths, so some apps don't
accept them.
Theo

yes you are correct but you can map a UNC to a drive letter....

Be aware that if you click on the "reconnect at Logon" option, and you
reboot with the external drive disconnected, Windows takes a longer time
to start up and also windows explorer takes longer to load as its trying
desperately to reconnect to a now disconnected external drive!

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

Post by Jeff Gaines
During the course of my post about a NAS/attached storage I said I had
managed to maintain the drive letters on my external drive.
I could scrap drive letters and just use URLs in Win 10 apparently by
mounting each drive in an NTFS directory.
I know Linux and Mac OS does that anyway. Anybody actually used it in
Windows? Any pros/cons? Would it work with drives on my attached storage?

Seems to me that the better idea would be to put the NAS/DAS drives into
some sort of redundant array where they appear as one volume to the
OS...

Cheers - Jaimie

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Jaimie Vandenbergh

Post by Jeff Gaines
During the course of my post about a NAS/attached storage I said I had
managed to maintain the drive letters on my external drive.
I could scrap drive letters and just use URLs in Win 10 apparently by
mounting each drive in an NTFS directory.
I know Linux and Mac OS does that anyway. Anybody actually used it in
Windows? Any pros/cons? Would it work with drives on my attached storage?

Seems to me that the better idea would be to put the NAS/DAS drives into
some sort of redundant array where they appear as one volume to the
OS...
Cheers - Jaimie

I don't want to close the circle so soon! I took a NAS out of service to
do this because it was impossible to tell what might be lost if the wrong
drive(s) went down.