As you know, the computer itself assigns a drive letter or other connected drive. But there are situations when the user may not be satisfied with the value selected by the system. For example, a person got used to the fact that a CD-ROM has the letter "F", and when reinstalling the system it suddenly became "E", and one of the hard drives assigned a letter from the CD drive.
But don't get upset. This is all fixable, and in this article I will talk in detail about how to change the drive letter (for a CD-ROM, hard drive, card reader or flash drive). Moreover, for this you do not need to use any third-party software, since this can be done using standard operating system tools. In my case, this is XP.
So, you can change the drive letter to any free one (from C to Z). As for A and B, these characters are reserved for diskette 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 usuallyis assigned to the system hard drive, so it will not be in the list of available ones.
It is also worth mentioning that you can change the drive letter not only with the standard Windows software. If you are an adherent of the Acronis Disk Director program, the GeeParted utility, and other similar software, you can also perform this procedure. But we will consider this using the standard Microsoft method as an example.
In order to change the drive letter, launch the start menu, activate the control panel, and then in the window that appears, find the service called administration. Double-click on it, open a tab called "Disk Management". Imagine that we need to change the drive letter for some removable media, such as a flash drive. It must be inserted into the port in advance.
So, when the service responsible for disk management starts, activate the necessary flash drive from the list, after which you should select the function of changing the letter or path to the device in the menu. When the next window opens, click on the change button, select one of the available unused letters. Confirm your choice with the "OK" button. After this action, you will see a warning and a question about whether you really want to change the drive letter. Confirm your action, after which the letter of your choice will be assigned to this flash drive.
What if you need to swap drive letters? No problem. Use some intermediate letter, while the sequence of actions will be the same as described above. The only thing you should understand is that this method cannot replace the letter assigned to the system drive, that is, the one on which all the files of your operating system are located. To do this, you will need to change the Windows registry links. This should be done very carefully, as you will need to reinstall the system in case of an error.
