Open Disk Management, the tool in Windows that lets you manage drive letters, among many other. To change the drive letter, select Change. To add a drive letter if the drive doesn't already have one, select Add. Select the new drive letter, select OK, and then select Yes when prompted about how programs that rely on the drive letter might not run correctly. Backups without drive letters - posted in Backup, Imaging, and Disk Management Software: In researching how ransomware works, its disconcerting that the infection can propagate to removable media. In our example, we are going to restrict D: drive. As soon as you click on the option, it'll open a new dialog box which allows you to change or remove the drive letter. Click on Remove button. Windows will show a warning message 'Some programs that rely on drive letters might not run correctly. Are you sure you want to remove this drive.
by Scott Johnson
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Today’s tip is pretty specific. You may never need to use it. I personally went a long time without needing to know how to change a drive letter in my Windows computer. But when the situation came up that required this to happen, it was very nice to know how to do it. And it’s actually not even difficult.
Can you think of a situation in which you might need to change a drive letter? Here’s how it came up with me, and with a few of my clients recently.
If you want to do a backup to a local drive (and you should, in addition to the automated online backup), the software that I use and recommend is called Second Copy. I wrote all about it here. When you set up Second Copy, you give it a set of instructions that basically tell it to copy your files to your external USB drive. When you do that, the program remembers the drive letter that your external drive uses. For example, it might show up as drive F. So the next time you run Second Copy, it looks for drive F and backs up your files, piece of cake.
External Hard Drive Letter Assignment
BUT…you don’t leave your external drive plugged in all the time. When it’s not plugged in, it’s not drive F. And what if you plug in some other USB device, such as a flash drive, a printer, or even a different portable drive. When you do that, THAT drive now takes drive F because it is the next available drive letter.
That means when you plug in your external drive next time, it might now be drive G or some other letter. And Second Copy won’t be able to do the backup because it can’t find your drive at drive F.
At this point you have two options:
A. You can change all of the backup settings so that each one looks for drive G instead of drive F. That’s a fair amount of work.
B. You can change the drive letter on your external drive from G back to F. This is much easier.
Here’s how you change the drive letter:
1. Click Start, then right click on Computer and choose Manage. Bet you’ve never clicked on that before, eh?
Usb Drive Letter Issues
2. Now you’ll see a new window open. This windows is called “Computer Management”. In that window, you want to click once on “Disk Management”.
3. Now look in the center column of the window, and you will see a list of your drives and their letters. Find the drive you want to change, and right click on it. Then, choose “Change Drive Letter and Paths”.
4. Now you’ll see a window pop up with the drive letter displayed, and a few options. Click the “Change” button:
5. In the next window, the options for “Assign the following drive letter” should already be chosen. Then use the drop-down menu to choose whatever drive letter you want to use. You can use any letter in the list.
6. After you have chosen the letter, click OK and close the remaining windows. All done!
You can go through this process whenever necessary. A warning however – you should probably never change the drive letter for your primary hard drive (usually it’s C) or any of the partitions on the drive. Some programs might rely on that “path” to work properly and you could mess things up if you change the letter.
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Have you ever had a situation when you plugged in your USB drive and it didn’t come up in the My Computer area along with other drives. One of the reasons behind this problem might be the drive letter.
Actually, Windows assigns letters to the drive when you plug it into the computer. It may be possible that Windows was trying to assign the letter which is already assigned to some other device, and hence it caused the new drive to not show up.
The best solution to this problem is to change the drive letter manually. Before assigning the drive letter you need to know this – you cannot change the drive letter of system volume or boot volume. So, if Windows is installed under C drive then you cannot change the C drive letter to some other letter.
Also, as many MS-DOS-based and Microsoft Windows based programs depend upon drive letters so changing the drive letter may lead to non-functionality of certain programs. So be a little cautious here.
Here is the step by step process of changing the drive letter of external USB drive (process is same for changing drive letter of any volume or partition).
1. Click on “Start” button. Type computer in the search box. Click on “Computer Management” which comes as result of your search.
2. Computer Management window will open .On the left pane, click on “Disk Management”. It will show you all the drives of your computer including external drives (connected to computer). In my case it is showing Kingston USB drive and a letter (G) is assigned to it.
3. You can change drive letter of any partition or USB stick by right clicking on it and selecting “Change Drive Letter and Paths” from the context menu.
4. Click on “Change” button.
5. Now click on drop down as shown in the figure given below. You can assign any of the given letters. Note that letter “C, D, E” are missing in the drop down menu. This is because these letters are already assigned to other partitions and drives.
6. Now when you assign any other letter to the drive, a message will pop up showing some program that rely on drive letters might not run correctly. Click “Yes” to continue.
That’s it. We are done.
You could also use the disk management console to perform some important activities such as creating extra partitions, formatting disk etc.
Have you ever changed the drive letter to solve your USB drive problems? Share your experiences in the comments.
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