Why can't I use more drive symbols than letters A to Z? [closed]

I have seen in Windows that you can assign drive letter or it is automatically being assinged by system.

The letters that are assigned must fall any from A to Z

Once I had in total more than 26 drives (out of which many were around 13 were logical drives many Virtual CD drive using UltraISO and PowerISO)

Then it stopped allowing more device to show up and also we can not assign drive names like

AA, AB , AC, AD and so on.

Why this is not possible?

Solution 1:

This is due to historical reasons. Many operating systems do not use drive letters. They either used a patch (e.g. unix like /, /usr, /mount/disk2) or a device name (e.g DF0: for floppy disk 0).

MSDOS is a CP/M clone which used drive letters. Back in those days (around 1981) you would never run into the luxury problem of needing more than a few.

The first windows versions were build on top of MSDOS and had the same limitations.

More modern windows systems do not. You can choose to mount a filesystem either under a path on an NTFS volume, or you can choose to use and old-fashioned drive letter. This part is mostly for compatibility with older programs and is has not changed. This includes no change to allow for dual letter letters.