In Windows you can change drive letters on a drive, a partition, or a volume, as long as it is not holding your system boot files. In this tutorial I will show you how to change drive letters on a hard drive by accessing Disk management. For example you might have two hard drives installed or one hard drive that has been partitioned. Therefore you can change drive letters for the second hard drive or any partition, even a cd/dvd drive, but not a drive containing system boot files. If you are trying to change drive letters in a dos command window then this tutorial is not for you.

How to change drive letters for a drive, a partition, or a volume?

The following tutorial is for Windows Vista and Windows Seven. If you have Windows XP please see how to change drive letters in windows XP.

1.  Go to the start menu. Find computer on the menu.

2.  Right click on computer to see a menu appear. Choose manage from the menu… See the screen shot below.

3.  Computer management will open. Choose Disk management from the left menu.

4.  All of the drives, partitions and volumes that you have on your computer will be listed. See the screenshot below.

5.  Right click on the drive you want to change the drive letter for. In the example below I have clicked on drive F:.

6.  A menu will appear. Choose Change drive letter and paths..

7.  A dialog box will appear. Select the drive you want to change the letter for.

8.  Then press on the change button below.

9.  Another box will appear and now you can choose a drive letter for your drive. To do this click on the drop down menu to change drive letters.

10.  When you have changed drive letters, press ok. That’s how easy it is to change drive letters of a drive, volume, or partition.

How to change drive letters on a cd/dvd drive?

When you are in disk management you will see the cd/dvd drives listed below all the other drives. Simple right click on the section where it names your cd/dvd rom. Please see the screen shot below. Now you can follow the same steps when changing drive letters.

Notes on how to change drive letters:

• You must be logged in as an Administrator or a member of the Administrators group to change drive letters.
• If you try to change drive letters of a system or boot volume you will receive an error message.

• You can also visit the Microsoft website to see more details on how to change drive letters.

Windows automatically assigns drive letters to the all drives on your computer and sometimes this just doesn’t suit your needs and it is handy to know that you can change drive letters.