Although the drive letters A and B are reserved for floppy disk drives, every other letter in the alphabet is available to be assigned to the hard drives or partitions in a computer. The main hard drive, by default, is always C drive. When you add more hard drives, partitions, or cd drives, Windows Xp assigns a drive letter to them automatically.
If you don’t like what drive letter Windows XP has assigned, it is your choice to change it. I usually like the hard drives set with drive letter that run in a row. For example, I have 2 hard drives with drive letters C and D. The cd drive and dvd drive are E and F.
How to change a hard drive letter in Windows XP
- Go to the Start Menu, choose control panel.
- Then Double click on the Administrative Tools, then computer management.
- Choose Disk Management in the left side menu. Then you see all your drives listed in the right side.
- Right-click on the drive you want to change.
- Then choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.
- Click Change, then click Assign the following drive letter, choose the drive letter you want to assign, and then click OK.
A quick shortcut to get to disk management to change the drive letters?
- Go to the start menu.
- Right click on my computer or computer for Windows Vista.
- Choose manage from the menu.
Assign a drive letter to a newly installed hard drive:
If you add a second hard drive to your computer, sometimes it will not be recognized by your computer until you assign it a drive letter. This is very easy. Just follow the steps above, but instead of renaming a drive letter you will be assigning a new drive letter to label your new hard drive. In the above screenshot you will see a hard drive with no drive letter. Simple right click on it to begin the steps.
When you try to change an existing drive letter, you receive the following error message:
The volume volume_label drive_letter is currently in use.
If you continue, the new drive letter will be assigned; but you can still use the old drive letter to access the volume until you restart your computer. The old drive letter will not be available for assignment until you restart.Warning: Changing the drive letter of a volume could cause programs to no longer run. Obviously this warning will appear if you are trying to change the drive letter of the main hard drive that your Windows operating system is on.
When should you change a drive letter of a hard drive or partition?
The best time to change a drive letter is when your computer is new or you have just formatted your computer. If you change a drive letter of a partition when you have already installed programs on it, you will cause these programs to not work. For example if you installed a game on D: drive and then later changed the D: drive to F: drive the game will not work. Firstly if you click on the desktop icon it will point to D:Program Filesgame foldergame.exe to start the game…But now the game is on F: See the problem here?
Notes:
- If your computer does not have a floppy disk drive, you can assign A and B as drive letters to removable drives.
- See more Windows XP tips.
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Mitz – who has written 759 posts on Computer Tips.
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