How to assign or change drive letters

These days many systems are likely to be using USB external drives of one sort or the other. Also, hard drives have become very large and many systems have partitions (or volumes as they are now called). The result is a plethora of drive letters. Windows XP may not always assign letters the way you like but you can easily change letter assignments if you wish.

Assignments of drive letters can be added, changed, or deleted in the Disk Management Console . There are several ways to open the console but using the Start-Run line is the way I do it. Enter “diskmgmt.msc” into Run (without quotes). The management console lists all the drives or partitions on your system. Find the entry for the volume of interest and right-click it. To make a change, click “Change Drive Letter and Paths”. The figure shown below will open.

Change drive letter

Clicking the “Change” button in the figure above opens the window shown below. Scroll to the letter you want, select it, and click “OK”. Then click “OK” again and close the Disk Management console.

Select new letter

Comments are closed.