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

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.

It's a historical thing. cd only changes current directory on the drive that is specified (current if none), and <drive>: changes drives to the folder on that drive which was cd'd earlier (\ if none)