Why is cd in Windows not able to switch between drives? [duplicate]

This is by design. Each "drive" has it's own working directory. You can use chdir, or you can simply type the drive letter:

> D:

And that will change to the D drive. If you want to know why this behavior exists, see Raymond Chen's Explanation

In windows could use the native cd/d <drive>:<path> or else chdir/d or pushd. It is the /d option that indicates that the drive should change as well. The pushd command does this by default.

Can even alias cd to make that the default behavior like so:

doskey cd=chdir/d $*

Then can use do things like:

cd D:\Temp
cd C:\WINDOWS

and the drive will change as well.

See the help by entering cd/? for more details.