How to change the drive letter. Simple Tips

As you know, the computer assigns a letter for the drive or another connected drive. But there are situations when the user can not arrange the value chosen by the system. For example, a person is accustomed to the fact that the CD-ROM has the letter "F", and when reinstalling the system suddenly became "E", and one of the hard drives appropriated a letter from the device CDs.

But do not be in a hurry to get upset. This is all fixable, and in this article I'll tell you in detail how to change the drive letter (for CD-ROM, hard drive, card reader or flash drive). And for this you do not need to use any third-party software, as this can be done with standard operating system tools. In my case it's XP.

So, you can change the drive letter to any unallocated (from C to Z). As for A and B, these symbols are reserved for floppy drives. But since recently these devices are not installed in computers and laptops, these letters can be assigned to one or another removable media, such as flash drives, for example. As for the letter "C", it is usually assigned to the system hard drive, so it will not be in the list of available hard disks.

It's also worth mentioning that you can change the drive letter not only with the standard Windows software. If you are an adherent of Acronis Disk Director, DjParted utilities and other similar software, you can also perform this procedure. But we will consider this using the standard Microsoft method.

To change the drive letter, start the start menu where you activate the control panel, and then in the window that appears, find a service called administration. Double click on it, open the tab called "Disk Management". Imagine that we need to change the drive letter for some removable media, for example, a flash drive. It must be inserted in the port in advance.

So, when the service responsible for managing disks starts , activate the necessary flash drive from the list, and then in the menu you should select the function of changing the letter or path to the device. When the following window appears, click the change button, select one of the available unallocated letters. Confirm your choice with the "OK" button. After this action, you will see a warning and a question about whether or not you want to change the drive letter. Confirm your action, after which this letter will be assigned to the letter you selected.

And what if you need to swap drive letters? No problems. Use some intermediate letter, the sequence of actions will be the same as described above. The only thing you should understand is that this method can not replace the letter assigned to the system disk, that is, the one on which all the files of your operating system are located. To do this, you will need to modify the links in the Windows registry. This should be done very carefully, because you will need to reinstall the system in case of an error.