letter assignment drive

How-To Geek

How to change a drive letter on windows 10 or windows 11.

You can change your drive letters in Windows 10 and 11 using the Disk Management utility.

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What changing a drive letter does, how to change a drive letter, how to fix programs broken by changing a drive letter.

Changing the letter of a drive is easy on Windows 10 and Windows 11, but you should do it as soon as you add the drive to prevent future hassles. Find out how to change a drive letter here.

Windows assigns drive letters alphabetically --- starting with C --- when they're initialized. If you want to change a drive letter, you should do it before you install anything on the drive. Changing a drive letter after programs are installed could break them since there will be references to an installation location that is no longer there.

Windows has gotten pretty smart about updating shortcuts so that programs work after changing a drive letter. Most of your applications' shortcuts will probably be automatically corrected. Unfortunately, Windows isn't as good about updating file associations. You'll have to manually set the default apps associated with files to fix file associations if they were broken by changing the drive letter.

It is possible to change the boot drive letter to something else, but we don't recommend it. Changing C:\ to another letter is likely to result in severe issues, like a PC that cannot boot into Windows at all. Even if it were able to boot, there would be a huge number of programs that would not be able to run.

Technically speaking, while they are commonly called drive letters, each letter actually refers to a partition on a disk. If you have multiple partitions on a single disk, you will need to assign a letter to each partition to make them all accessible. If a disk has just a single partition, it will just have a single letter pointing to that partition. (However, you do not have to assign a letter to each partition. Partitions without drive letters will not appear in File Explorer and elsewhere.)

Changing a drive letter is pretty simple. Click the Start button, type "Disk Management" in the search bar, and then hit Enter.

The program name displayed in the search will not be Disk Management. It will be "Create and format hard disk partitions."

You could also hit Windows+X or right-click the Start button, and then click "Disk Management."

Identify the drive you'd like to change in the Disk Management Window. In this example, we'll change the letter of the D:\ drive to J:\. You can right-click the drive on the text list, or on the menu below. Either works.

Select "Change Drive Letter and Paths" in the right-click menu that appears.

In the window that pops up, click "Change."

Select whatever letter you want from the drop-down menu. Then click "Ok."

Two popups will warn you about changing your drive letter. Click "Yes" on both of them, and then restart your computer.

Once Windows has restarted, the drive letter should be changed.

There are a few ways you can fix a program broken by changing the drive letter.

Fix The Shortcut

If you're lucky, the only thing that is broken is the shortcut. Fix a shortcut by right-clicking the shortcut on your desktop, and then click Properties.

You need to change the target of the shortcut to the new drive letter.

For example, if GIMP was previously installed at " D :\GIMP 2\bin\gimp-2.10.exe," and you changed the D drive to J, change the target of the shortcut to " J :\GIMP 2\bin\gimp-2.10.exe."

Finalize the change by clicking "Apply" and then "Ok."

Reinstall the Program

Reinstalling the program will generate new entries in the registry, so everything on the computer will know where to look for the program. Some installers won't like reinstalling directly over existing files, so you may need to rename or delete the old installation first.

Change the Drive Letter Back

If you changed the drive letter of a drive with a lot of programs installed, it might be easier to change the drive letter back. Changing the drive letter back should automatically fix any programs and file associations that were broken.

Edit the Registry

You can break programs, or even Windows itself, by editing the registry. Be careful, and learn about how to edit the registry before you try it. Make sure you backup the Windows registry first. You should not attempt this method unless you have no other options.

Windows, and a lot of programs, track where programs are installed via the Windows registry. It is possible to manually adjust the registry to fix broken programs. Keep in mind that there could be dozens of registry entries you need to edit. A program like GIMP can have registry entries for the context menu, for the "Open With" menu, for any file associations, and for the location of its executables. Other programs may only have a few entries related to where it is installed.

If you're not deterred, here's how you do it.

First, you need to know where the program was previously installed. In this case, the program was installed to the "D:\GIMP 2" folder, and the executables were found the "D:\GIMP 2\bin" sub-folder. It is now located at "J:\GIMP 2" instead.

We need to update the registry to reflect the change in location. Click the Start button, type "regedit" into the search bar, right-click Regedit, and click "Run as administrator."

In Regedit, hit Ctrl+F to bring up a search window. Type in the old location for the program you're trying to fix --- "D:\GIMP 2" for our example --- then click "Find Next."

Once Regedit has found something with "D:\GIMP 2" as part of a path, it'll show it to you. Here is an example from the GIMP search.

To actually change them, double click the name of the registry entry you want to modify. Then change the drive letter to J, or whatever you chose. If you didn't otherwise move the folder, leave the rest of the path alone. Then click "Ok."

You'll need to repeat this multiple times. To find the next result using your search term, you can hit the F3 key. There will be a popup once you've found all of the entries.

Changing drive letters can be a simple way to customize your PC. Do it before you install anything on the drive, however. You'll prevent any problems before they occur, and probably save yourself quite a bit of troubleshooting.

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Change a drive letter

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Applies To: Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2019, and Windows Server 2016

If you want to change a drive letter assigned to a drive, or you have a drive that doesn't yet have a drive letter, use Disk Management to change it. You can also mount the drive in an empty folder so that it appears as a folder. For more information, see Mount a drive in a folder .

If you change the drive letter of a drive that already contains Windows or apps, apps might have trouble running or finding the drive. We suggest not changing the drive letter of a drive that already contains Windows or apps.

The following steps show how to change the drive letter.

Open Disk Management with administrator permissions.

In Disk Management, select and hold (or right-click) the volume on which you want to change or add a drive letter and select Change Drive Letter and Paths .

If you don't see the Change Drive Letter and Paths option or it's grayed out, the volume either isn't ready to receive a drive letter or it's unallocated and needs to be initialized . It might also be that the drive isn't accessible, which is the case with EFI system partitions and recovery partitions. If you've confirmed that your volume is formatted with a drive letter that you can access but you're still unable to change it, that's beyond the scope of this article. We suggest contacting Microsoft Support or the manufacturer of your PC for more help.

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 and choose OK . Then select Yes when prompted about how programs that rely on the drive letter might not run correctly.

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How to assign permanent letters to drives on Windows 10

You can assign drive letters manually, and in this guide, we show you how on Windows 10.

On Windows 10, when connecting a removable storage device or an internal hard drive, the system detects and assigns a drive letter automatically to make it usable. However, when reconnecting an external drive (such as a USB flash drive or SD or microSD cards), the system can end up assigning a different letter, which can be annoying.

If you want to see the same drive letter on a particular device, you can manually assign a permanent letter to any drive connected to your computer, and on Windows 10 , you can do this in at least three different ways, using Disk Management, Command Prompt, or PowerShell.

Using this approach will prevent Windows 10 from assigning a new letter or trying to set a letter already in use, which can cause conflicts. Also, it helps to select a drive letter that makes more sense to you.

In this Windows 10 guide, we walk you through several methods to manually assign a permanent letter to a drive, as long as you're connecting the drive to the same device and the letter isn't already in use.

How to assign a drive letter using Disk Management

How to assign a drive letter using command prompt, how to assign a drive letter using powershell.

To manage drive letters with the Disk Management tool, use these steps:

• Open Start .
• Search for Create and format hard disk partitions and click the top result to open the Disk Management experience.
• Right-click the drive and select the Change Drive Letter and Paths option.

• Click the Change button.

• Select the Assign the following drive letter option.
• Use the drop-down menu to assign a new drive letter. Quick tip: To avoid the system trying to assign the same letter to another drive, it's a good idea to start adding letters in backward order. For instance, instead of using D, E or F, it better to start with Z, Y or X when assigning a new letter.

• Click the OK button.
• Click the OK button again.

Once you complete these steps, the drive will permanently retain the assigned letter, even after reconnecting it. However, if you connect the drive to another device, it may receive a different letter.

While the easiest way to assign a new drive letter is to use Disk Management, you can also use DiskPart in Command Prompt to perform the same task.

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To assign a drive letter using Command Prompt, use these steps:

• Search for Command Prompt , right-click the result, and then select the Run as administrator option.
• Type the following command to start DiskPart and press Enter : diskpart
• Type the following command to list all the available volumes and press Enter : list volume
• Type the following command to select the volume (drive) to assign a new letter and press Enter: select volume 3 In the command, make sure to change "3" to the number that represents the drive on your device.
• Type the following command to assign a new drive letter, and press Enter : assign letter=Z The command assigns the letter "Z" to the drive assuming it's available. However, you need to make sure to change the letter for the one that you want to use.

After completing these steps, similar to Disk Management, every time you reconnect the storage to the same device, Windows 10 should assign the same letter automatically.

Alternatively, you can also use PowerShell to change a drive letter on Windows 10 using these steps:

• Search for PowerShell , right-click the result, and then select the Run as administrator option.
• Type the following command to list the available drives and press Enter : Get-Disk
• Type the following command to assign a permanent letter to the drive and press Enter : Get-Partition -DiskNumber 1 | Set-Partition -NewDriveLetter Z In the command, make sure to change "1" to the number that represents the drive that you want to modify, and change "Z" for the new letter that you want to use.

Once you complete the steps, the drive will be accessible through File Explorer using the letter that you assigned, and Windows 10 won't try to change it.

Updated March 7, 2019: We revised this guide to make sure it's current with the latest version of Windows 10.

More Windows 10 resources

For more helpful articles, coverage, and answers to common questions about Windows 10, visit the following resources:

• Windows 10 on Windows Central – All you need to know
• Windows 10 help, tips, and tricks
• Windows 10 forums on Windows Central

Mauro Huculak is technical writer for WindowsCentral.com. His primary focus is to write comprehensive how-tos to help users get the most out of Windows 10 and its many related technologies. He has an IT background with professional certifications from Microsoft, Cisco, and CompTIA, and he's a recognized member of the Microsoft MVP community.

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How to assign a drive letter in Windows 10

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When you connect a new drive to your PC, Windows automatically assigns the next available letter after C, which is normally used for your system drive. So an external hard drive or USB thumb drive could end up as D, E, F, or whatever, depending on how many drive letters are already being used.

This is all well and good, but what if you want to assign the drive a letter? Maybe you want to use M for your music files or X for your top-secret X-Files. Here’s how in Windows 10.

• Ensure that the drive you’re relettering isn’t in use and that no files from that drive are open.
• Right-click on the Start button.
• Click Disk Management to open the Disk Management console.
• Right-click the volume that has the drive letter you want to change.
• Click Change Drive Letter And Paths.
• Click the Change button.
• Choose from a list of available drive letters. (Don’t use A or B, which have historically been reserved for floppy drives and can sometime confuse older software.)
• Click Yes if a popup windows appears asking if you really want to do this.
• Close the Disk Management console.

You may need to restart your machine for the change to take effect, but once you do the drive will use the new letter.

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How to Change a Drive Letter

Don't like the letters assigned to your drives in Windows? Change them!

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What to Know

• Open Disk Management. Locate the drive you want to change. Right-click and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths > Change .
• Select the drive letter you want to assign from Assign the following drive letter . Then select OK and choose Yes .

The letters assigned to your hard drives, optical drives, and USB drives in Windows are not fixed. Use the Disk Management tool in Windows to change drive letters. These steps apply to Windows XP and newer versions of Windows .

How to Change Drive Letters in Windows

Follow these steps to change the driver letters in any version of Windows.

You can't change the drive letter of the partition that Windows is installed onto. On most computers, this is usually the C drive.

Open Disk Management , the tool in Windows that lets you manage drive letters, among [many] other things.

In Windows 11/10/8, Disk Management is also available from the Power User Menu ( WIN + X  keyboard shortcut) and is probably the quickest way to open it. You can also start Disk Management from the Command Prompt in any version of Windows, but starting it via Computer Management is probably best for most of you.

Locate from the list at the top, or from the map at the bottom, the drive you want to change the drive letter of.

If you're not sure that the drive you're looking at is really the one you want to change the drive letter for, you can right-click or tap-and-hold the drive and then choose Explore . If you need to, look through the folders to see if that's the right drive.

Right-click or tap-and-hold the drive and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths .

Select Change .

If you've selected the primary drive by accident, some versions of Windows will display a message that reads Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your system volume or boot volume.

Choose the drive letter you want Windows to assign to this storage device by selecting it from the Assign the following drive letter drop-down box.

You don't need to worry if the drive letter is already being used by another drive because Windows hides any letters you can't use.

Select OK .

Choose Yes to the Some programs that rely on drive letters might not run correctly. Do you want to continue? question.

If you have software installed to this drive, it might stop working properly after changing the drive letter. See details on this in the section below.

Once the drive letter change is complete, which usually only takes a second or two, you're welcome to close any open Disk Management or other windows.

The drive letter is different from the volume label. You can change the volume label using similar steps .

If You Have Programs Not on the Main Drive

Changing drive letter assignments for drives that have software installed to them may cause the software to stop working. This isn't quite as common with newer programs and apps but if you have an old program, especially if you're still using Windows XP or Windows Vista, this is likely to be a problem.

Fortunately, most of us don't have software installed to drives other than the primary drive (typically the C drive), but if you do, consider this your warning that you might need to reinstall the software after changing the drive letter.

No Changes for the Operating System Drive

You cannot change the drive letter of the drive that the Windows operating system is installed on. If you'd like Windows to exist on a drive other than C , or whatever it happens to be now, you can make that happen but you'll have to complete a clean install of Windows to do it. Unless you have a pressing need to have Windows exist on a different drive letter, we don't recommend going through all that trouble.

Change, Don't Switch

There's no built-in way to switch drive letters between two drives in Windows. Instead, use a drive letter that you don't plan on using as a temporary "holding" letter during the drive letter change process.

For example, let's say you'd like to swap Drive A for Drive B . Start by changing Drive A's letter to one that you don't plan on using (like X ), then Drive B's letter to Drive A's original one, and finally Drive A's letter to Drive B's original one.

Using the Command Prompt

You can also change the drive letter from Command Prompt . It's not as easy as using Disk Management and you can't see right away which letters are available to choose, but it is completely doable with the diskpart command.

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How to Change a Drive Letter in Windows

Sometimes when you plug in a USB device, it doesn't show up

A task you will most likely have to perform a few times in Windows is changing the drive letter for an external hard drive, mapped network drive, or DVD drive. Sometimes when you plug in a USB flash drive, it doesn’t automatically get a drive letter assigned to it and it may not show up on your computer.

In those types of cases, you have to change the drive letter for the device and it will normally pop right up. In this article, I’ll show you how to change the drive letter for these devices using the GUI and also via the command prompt.

Change Drive Letter via Disk Management

You can open disk management on a Windows PC by either right-clicking on the Computer or This PC icon on the desktop and choosing Manage or by clicking on Start and typing in diskmgmt.msc .

You’ll see a list of volumes at the top and the disks and partitions at the bottom. Any partition that has a drive letter will be shown in the white area. If you connected a USB drive and you see it listed, but it doesn’t have a drive letter, you can now assign one.

To assign or change the drive letter for a disk or partition, simply right-click on it and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths .

A window will pop up with the current drive letter, if there is one, and a couple of options. Here you want to click on Change .

Next, you will choose the new drive letter from the dropdown list. You can pick from the letters A to Z.

That’s about it. Click OK to close out all the dialogs and the drive should now show up in Windows with the new drive letter. If you’re having issues using the GUI interface or you simply feel more comfortable using the command prompt, read the instructions below on how to use diskpart.

Use DiskPart to Assign Drive Letter

If you need to change or assign a drive letter via the command prompt, you have to use the diskpart command. I’ve written a bit on how to use diskpart , which is really useful for many disk management tasks.

To get started, open an administrator command prompt in Windows by clicking on Start, typing in CMD and then right-clicking and choosing Run as Administrator .

Now type in the following commands, each followed by the Enter key.

Above, you’ll replace x with the volume number in the list that corresponds to the drive you want to change and with the letter you want to assign to the drive. Here are the commands I ran for an external USB drive:

You’ll also notice that under the Type column, external drives will show up as Removable . That’s a good way to check before you select a volume. You can also figure out which drive is correct by looking at the size and also looking at the Info column. Volume 0 in my case is the system partition, so I wouldn’t want to mess with that by accident.

Overall, it’s a fairly simple process and hopefully you won’t run into any problems. There are times, however, when things don’t work properly. Below are some possible reasons.

Troubleshoot Can’t Change Drive Letter in Windows

One problem that I have seen is that the Change Drive Letter option is simply greyed out. This can occur for a few reasons. One of the main reasons is the volume is not formatted in FAT or NTFS format. For example, if you are attaching a disk from a Mac computer, you will not be able to change the drive letter unless you format the drive into a compatible format.

Another reason is if the drive is set to read-only. If so, you’ll have to Google the steps to change the drive to allow read/write access.

Also, if you don’t need any of the data on the volume in question, a simple solution is to delete the volume, which is normally never greyed out. Once you delete the volume, you can right-click again and create a new simple volume. Now you will be able to change the drive letter.

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How to Assign / Change Drive Letter in Windows 10

We show you how to change the drive letter in CMD, DIsk Management, PowerShell, and Registry editor in Windows 10.

Table of Contents:

Windows 10 helpfully assigns drive letters to disks as they're added, but they aren't always the most logical choices. While we all know that C: is the system drive, it doesn't make quite as much sense to have D: as your games drive or E: as your media drive. Luckily it's quite easy to change a drive letter in Windows 10, and we're going to walk you through the process today.

How does Windows 10 drive letter assignment work?

For the most part, Windows 10 automatically assigns letters to drives as they're connected, in alphabetical order. However, there are a few exceptions to this rule that may leave some users confused.

As mentioned earlier, C: is always reserved for the system drive, but A: and B: are reserved too, for rarely used floppy drives. Because of Windows automatic assignment, you may have also noticed that Windows changes the drive letter of your USB stick if you've connected another before it.

If you want letters that are easier to identify in bios or don't want your USB letters jumping around, it's quite easy to permanently change a drive letter in Windows 10 to something of your choosing. We're going to cover a few different ways today, including how to change the drive letter in CMD.

How to Change Drive Letter in Windows 10 via Disk Management

The most user-friendly way to assign drive letters in Windows is through the Disk Management interface, which is relatively easy to use.

How to Change Drive Letter in CMD using a DISKPART Disk Management Command

Though it's not quite as user-friendly, it can be much faster to change a drive letter with Command Prompt.

How to Change Drive Letter in Windows 10 with a PowerShell Disk Management Command

Those more familiar with PowerShell can use this method instead to achieve the same result.

How to Change / Assign a Drive Letter via the Registry Editor

Alternatively, if none of the above methods worked or you're just feeling brave, you can modify the drive letter via the registry. Just be sure to read our safe registry editing guide first.

If you enjoyed this guide, you may want to consider enabling or disabling disk caching or turning on BitLocker for your newly customized drives.

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How to change drive letter on Windows 11

Here are four ways to assign a different letter to a drive on Windows 11.

On Windows 11 , a “drive letter” is automatically assigned to each internal storage, USB drive, DVD drive, and map network drive to identify the volume and make it available on File Explorer or other applications. However, you can change the drive letter to anything you want without deleting the data on the storage. For instance, if you want a drive to use a specific letter related to the content, or the system tries to assign a letter already in use, preventing the storage from appearing on File Explorer and apps.

Whatever the reason, on Windows 11, you can assign a different drive letter in at least four ways using the Settings app, Disk Management, Command Prompt, and PowerShell.

A drive letter (or device letter) can be any character from the English alphabet. However, you cannot use the “C:” because it’s reserved for the main storage that contains the installation. Also, “A:” and “B:” are reserved letters that used to be assigned automatically to floppy drives.

This guide will teach you how to assign a new drive letter on Windows 11.

Change drive letter on Windows 11

• Change drive letter from Disk Management on Windows 11

Change drive letter from Command Prompt on Windows 11

Change drive letter from powershell on windows 11.

To change the drive letter on Windows 11, use these steps:

Open Settings on Windows 11.

Click on System .

Click the Storage tab.

Under the “Storage management” section, click the “Advanced storage settings” option.

Click on Disks & volumes .

Select the drive with the volume with the letter to change.

Select the volume and click the Properties button.

Click the “Change drive letter” button.

Select the new drive letter for the device connected to Windows 11.

Click the OK button.

Once you complete the steps, the system will change the drive’s letter on Windows 11.

Change drive letter from Disk Management

To change the drive letter with Disk Management, use these steps:

Open Start .

Search for Create and format disk partitions and click the top result to open the Disk Management tool.

Right-click the volume and select the “Change Drive Letter and Paths” option.

Click the Change button.

Select the “Assign the following drive letter” option.

Choose a different letter for the drive.

Click the OK button again.

After completing the steps, the drive will appear in File Explorer with the new letter.

To add a new drive letter with Command Prompt, use these steps:

Search for Command Prompt , right-click the result, and select the Run as administrator option.

Type the following command to launch diskpart and press Enter :

Type the following command to list the volumes and press Enter :

Type the following command to select the volume (drive) to change the letter and press Enter :

In the command, change “2” for the number corresponding to the storage you want to change the letter.

Type the following command to change the drive letter on Windows 11 and press Enter :

In the command, change “H” for the letter you want to use with the drive.

Once you complete the steps, the diskpart tool will assign the new letter to the storage.

To change a Windows 11 drive letter with PowerShell, use these steps:

Search for PowerShell , right-click the result, and select the Run as administrator option.

Type the following command to identify the hard drive to change the letter and press Enter :

Type the following command to assign or change the drive letter to internal or external and press Enter :

In the above command, change “0” with the disk number of the drive you want to format and “F:” with the letter you wish to assign to the storage.

After completing the steps, the drive will have a new letter assignment. If the drive was previously missing, it will appear in File Explorer.

Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 14 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter) , YouTube , LinkedIn and About.me . Email him at [email protected] .

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6 Ways to Change the Drive Letter in Windows

If your PC suddenly stops showing one of your internal drives in the file explorer or not list your external drive, it could be due to the OS getting confused with the drive letters. Simply changing your assigned drive letters can help you bypass this conflict. Here are six ways to change the drive letter.

1. Change the Drive Letter Using Settings

2. using command prompt, 3. disk management, 4. registry editor, 5. windows powershell, 6. drive letter changer software, frequently asked questions.

Also read: How to Clean Up and Make Space on Your Windows “C” Drive

Is It Safe to Change a Drive Letter in Windows?

Changing the drive letter is not entirely harmless and can cause significant problems based on the contents of your drive. If you have applications and software installed on your drive, those applications may cease to work.

For example, if you change the name of your D: drive to an F: drive, then the software installed in the D drive will still search for code in the D: file. While you can still access the data inside, there may be errors that will cause a nuisance in your day-to-day usage.

However, you may safely change the letter of some drives. If a partition simply includes data files that you rarely use, changing the drive letter may cause minor inconvenience, but nothing serious. The letters of external drives can almost always be changed without any problems.

• Press Win + I to open the Settings app, then select the “System” tab. Scroll down and click on “Storage.”

• Scroll down on the right side and click on “Advanced storage settings.”

• Under Advanced storage settings, click on “Disks & Volumes.”

• Select the drive whose letter you want to change, then click on the “Properties” button for that drive.

• In the Drive Properties, you will find the option to change the drive letter of the selected drive.

• Once you click on the option to change the drive letter, you will find a drop-down menu that will allow you to change the drive letter.

• Click on the letter you want to assign.

• Once you have selected your preferred letter, click on “OK” to confirm your choice.

Also read: How to Format a Drive in FAT32 in Windows

• Search for the command prompt on the start menu by typing cmd , right-click on it, and select “Run as administrator”.

• On the command prompt home screen, type:

• Press Enter , then type:

• Press Enter. You’ll see a list of your system’s drives. Make a note of the volume number of the drive. In the example pictured, it’s “Volume 3”.

• Type the following code:
• Type the following code to assign the new letter:

Instead of “new drive letter,” type the letter you want. For example: assign letter=S

The drive letter will be changed to your preferred letter.

Also read: 8 Ways to Customize Windows Terminal

• Right-click on the Windows button and open “Disk Management.”

• Under the “Volume” column, you will find the various partitions of your storage. You need to find the drive whose letter you’ll change and right-click on it.

• In the dialog box that appears, click on “Change.”

• Click the drop-down menu next to “Assign the following drive letter,” then select your letter and press “OK.”

• A warning message will pop up. Click “Yes” if you are sure about your decision to change the drive letter.

Also read: Which Allocation Unit Size Is Best for Your Drive?

• To change the drive letter through registry editor, first press Win + R to open the Run dialog and type regedit .

• Type in the following address at the top of the application:

and press Enter .

• Navigate to the list of binary keys. Select the key that corresponds to the drive letter that you want to change. For example, if we want to change the letter of the D: drive, we would look for “\DosDevices\D:”
• Right-click on the selected registry and rename the drive letter to what you want, just as you would rename any other file.You will have to restart your computer for the effects to take place.

Also read: 16 Useful Windows Registry Hacks to Optimize Your Experience

• Using the search button on the taskbar, search for “Powershell” and run it as administrator.

• Type the following command:

• A screen will show you your disk partitions. Make a note of what drive letter you want to change.

• To change the drive letter, type the following command:

Make sure to substitute “current drive letter’ and “new drive letter” with the actual drive letters, then press Enter .

Also read: How to Map a WebDAV Drive in Windows

If you are looking for a tool that can help you manage your partition and drives, these software will help you change your drive letter.

• MiniTool Partition Wizard
• AOMEI Partition Assistant
• EaseUS Partition Master

These tools are easy to use and have GUI interfaces that make them simple to use and also a one-stop destination for you to manage your storage devices. For the purposes of the demonstration, we are using MiniTool Partition Wizard to change the drive letter.

• Download MiniTool Partition Wizard. (It is a direct download link.)

• Run the installer and launch the app. You will get a listing of all your drive partitions mentioned below.

• Right-click on the target drive partition and select “Change Letter.”

• Open the drop-down list and select a new drive letter for your target drive.

• Click on “Apply” to save the changes.

• You will receive a warning pop-up asking you to close all background applications. Click “Yes.”

• You will now receive a confirmation message telling you that the new changes have been applied.Click “OK.”

Also read: How to Format Your USB Drives in Windows

1. How are drive letters assigned in Windows?

Drive letters are assigned to every new drive in alphabetical order. Traditionally, the A: and B: drives were used for floppy disks, and the system drive on which Windows is installed is named C: by default.

2. Can I change the drive letter for the System Drive?

No, changing the drive letter on the system drive is not possible, as Windows is installed on the system drive. If that was changed, the system drive would not be found and the computer would cease working.

3. Can I switch drive letters among two drives?

No, there is no functionality in Windows to switch drive letters directly between two drives. If you want to switch the drive letters between the D: drive and the E: drive, you will have first change the D: drive to another letter (so as to free up the D:), change the E: to D:, then change the first one to E:.

Image credit: Plastic magnetic letters by 123RF

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Ojash has been writing about tech back since Symbian-based Nokia was the closest thing to a smartphone. He spends most of his time writing, researching, or ranting about Bitcoin. Ojash also contributes to other popular sites like MakeUseOf, SlashGear, and MacBookJournal.

How to change a drive’s letter in Windows

Windows assigns drive letters for all the hard disk drives, solid-state drives, optical media units, removable drives, and memory cards connected to your computer. Because the operating system does that on its own, you might be tempted to think that these drive letters cannot be changed. However, that is not true because Windows lets you change the drive letter of any drive as long as it is not already used for another. Here is how to change a drive’s letter in Windows 11 and Windows 10:

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How to change a drive’s letter in windows 11’s settings, how to change a drive’s letter using disk management, how to change a drive’s letter in cmd (command prompt), how to change a drive’s letter with powershell, did you change any drive letters in windows.

NOTE: Except for the first method in this guide, which only applies to Windows 11, all the other methods for changing a drive’s letter work the same both in Windows 11 and Windows 10. Before you go ahead, keep in mind that changing the letter of the drive where Windows is installed is not recommended and cannot be done following the instructions in this guide. Also, you should know that changing a drive letter is generally safe and shouldn’t result in any data loss. That is… unless you’ve installed apps or games on the drive whose drive letter you want to change. In this case, those apps or games may stop running correctly.

Attempting to change the OS drive letter results in error

If you’re using Windows 11, a straightforward way to change the drive letter of a partition or removable drive is offered by the Settings app. Open Settings ( Win + I ) and select System in the left sidebar. Then, on the right side of the window, click or tap on Storage.

Open Settings and go to System > Storage

Scroll down to locate the Storage management section. Then, click or tap on the Advanced storage settings .

Head to Advanced storage settings

In the expanded list of Advanced storage settings , click or tap on Disks & volumes .

Open the Disks & volumes

This opens a new page where you can “View and manage properties of your disks and volumes.” Find the partition whose drive letter you want to change and click or tap the Properties button next to it.

Click Properties next to the drive

This loads a new page in the Settings app where you can see and change some options regarding the partition or volume you’ve chosen. To set a new drive letter for it, click or tap the Change drive letter in the Volume data section.

Click Change drive letter

Windows 11 will then ask you to “Choose which drive letter to use for this volume.” Click or tap on the currently displayed letter.

Choose which drive letter to use for this volume

Select the new drive letter you want to use.

Select the new drive letter

The new drive letter is now selected. To save your changes and assign the drive letter, click or tap on OK .

Assign the new drive letter

The drive letter has been changed. You can now close the Settings app and continue your work on your Windows 11 PC.

Another way to change the drive letter of a partition or removable drive is available in the Disk Management tool. Open the Disk Management : a quick method that works the same in both Windows 11 and Windows 10 is to use the WinX menu: right-click (or tap and hold) the Windows button on the taskbar and select Disk Management in the menu.

Open Disk management

The Disk Management tool opens, and it should look similar to the screenshot below.

The Disk Management window

Find the drive whose drive letter you want to change and right-click on it (or press and hold on it if you are using a touchscreen). This action opens a context menu similar to the one in the next screenshot. In the menu, click (or tap) on the “Change Drive Letter and Paths” option.

Right-click the drive and select Change Drive Letter and Paths

Disk Management opens a small window called “Change Drive Letter and Paths for [Drive Letter]:.” In the field called “Allow access to this volume by using the following drive letter and paths,” you can see the letter that is presently used for that drive. For instance, one of my USB solid-state drives used the drive letter F .

The current drive letter

Click or tap the Change button.

Click the Change button

Another dialog window, Change Drive Letter or Path, opens. In it, there’s an option called “Assign the following drive letter.” On the right, you’ll find a list with all the letters of the alphabet that aren’t in use. The default value is the drive letter that is currently used by the drive you selected.

Assign the following drive letter

Click or tap on the drive letter list and select the new drive letter that you want to assign to the drive.

Choose the new drive letter

After you select the new drive letter, click or tap OK .

Windows might alert you to the fact that “Some programs that rely on drive letters might not run correctly.” . You should know that, in most cases, changing the drive letter is not an issue, and modern apps should not stop running correctly. If you’re using older programs, they may have problems running correctly if they need access to the drive in question. Windows gives you the option to continue or not. If you are still determined to change the drive letter, go ahead and press Yes .

Some programs that rely on drive letters may not run correctly

If you’ve chosen to continue, the drive letter is instantly changed to the one you selected.

The drive letter was changed

The drive letter has been changed so you can carry on with whatever you want to do on your Windows 11 or Windows 10 computer.

Did you know that you can change a drive’s letter in Windows using the command line, too? Here’s how it all works:

As an administrator user, open the Command Prompt or, if you prefer, launch Terminal and open a Command Prompt tab in it. Then, run this next command to access the disk partitioning tools:

Running diskpart in CMD

To see all the volumes on your Windows 11 or Windows 10 computer, execute this next command:

In the output, find the volume you want to assign a new drive letter. In the example below, you can see that the one I want to change is marked as Volume 5 on my computer, and its current drive letter is N .

Find the volume

Once you’ve identified the drive that you want to change the drive letter for, you need to select it. To do so, run this command replacing [number] with the real number of your volume:

Select the volume

Finally, to change the drive letter of the selected volume, run this command replacing the letter X with the one you prefer:

Change the drive letter

That’s it: the drive letter has been changed. You can now either continue using diskpart for other disk operations, or you can close Command Prompt and continue working on your Windows PC.

PowerShell can also help you change drive letters in Windows, and using it actually feels a bit more structured. That’s because the sequence of commands in PowerShell follows more closely the real structure of a drive. The drive is the physical device that stores data, aka the hard disk or the solid-state drive. But to actually have access to the storage, a drive must have at least one partition, which is a logical division of the drive that, in turn, must also have at least one volume on it. The volume is the logical representation of the partition that can be accessed and used by the operating system and to which you can assign a drive letter.

Having said all that, to change a drive letter, launch PowerShell as admin or open a PowerShell tab in Windows Terminal . Then, run this command to see the drives installed on your Windows PC:

Once the results are in, identify the drive where the volume you want to change the drive letter is found. It shouldn’t be hard to find it, considering that you get to see the names of your drives as well as their size in the list. For instance, in the next screenshot, the drive I’m looking for is the one marked with the number 3, which is my portable 1TB solid-state drive.

See the drives installed

Now that you know the drive, you need to find some information about the partition(s) on it. For that, run this command replacing the disk [number] with the one that applies to you:

Get information about the partitions

In the output of the command, identify the partition you’re interested in: its current drive letter is listed in the DriveLetter column.

Identify the partition

Now that you’ve gathered all the required information, you can change the drive letter. To to that, run this command replacing the [disknumber] and the [partitionnumber] with the ones you’ve identified earlier, and change the [driveletter] with the one you want to set:

In my case, for example, because I want to change the drive letter to N , the command looks like this:

Change the drive letter in PowerShell

The action is performed immediately, and if all goes well, you shouldn’t get any feedback from PowerShell . Thus, you can close it and carry on with whatever it is you want to do on your Windows computer.

As you have seen, changing drive letters in Windows is something you can do in a multitude of ways. If you want to organize your drives by changing their letters, now you know how to do it. Do you have something to add to this guide? For any additions or questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment in the section below.

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3 Simple Ways to Assign a Drive Letter in Windows 10/8/7

How to assign a drive letter in Windows 10/8/7? This post covers three ways to assign a drive letter by using Disk Management, a partition manager, and Diskpart in CMD.

 Windows 11/10/8/7  100% Secure

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Updated on Apr 19, 2024

What Is a Drive Letter

A drive letter is an alphabetic character identifying a physical computer disk or drive partition. Windows will assign an accessible drive letter by default, to any storage device. It starts from A to Z, going through all the alphabet. Windows will assign an accessible drive letter by default, to any storage device.

The system reserves the drive letters A: and B: for the floppy drive and portable media, such as tape drives. Even if your computer doesn't have these drivers installed. But you can still assign such letters manually if you wish. On computers with hard drives, the default drive letter is always C:. The CD-ROM or other disc drive is the last drive letter (e.g., D:). It's because C: is the first drive letter available on a hard disk. The drive letter C: can only be assigned to the drive on which Windows or MS-DOS is installed.

Windows will always be the drive letter C:,  even if you have several operating systems running. Most modern desktops and laptops now have hard drives and disc drives, like DVD drives, but not floppy disks. Even in this case, the C: drive is assigned to the hard drive, and the D: drive is assigned to the DVD drive.

Windows assigns the last drive letter to flash drives, smartphones, and other drives. For example, if the last drive letter was F:, and you plug a new drive, it is allocated as a G: drive until you unplug it. If you install more drives or create new partitions, they are allocated to drive letters other than C:, like D:, E:, F:, G:, and so on. Instead of the drive letter given by Windows, you may alter it to any other accessible drive letter.

How Assigned Drive Letters Work

You can alter the drive letter assigned by Windows. In the case you alter a drive's drive letter, the registry saves it per drive and volume ID. This does not permanently assign a drive letter to the device. The drive letter on your PC may change if you unplug the device or if you alter it.

If you use many USB drives, you may have observed that the drive letter changes each time you attach one. When non-assigned drives are attached, the letters D and onwards are assigned in turn. If the assigned drive is not attached, Windows will assign its drive letter to another drive. If you connect the drive with the given drive letter later, it will be assigned the next available letter.

Windows gives you several options for changing the drive letter of your computer. With this guide, you'll learn how to assign drive letters using three different tools. We will use Disk Management, EaseUS Partition Master, and Windows Command Prompt.

Extended Reading: Drive Letter Not Available

Assign a Drive Letter on Windows 10 with Disk Management

The Disk Management utility that comes with Windows lets you manage your disks. Change drive letters , create new partitions, delete existing partitions, and more.

Follow the steps below to change the drive letter.

Step 1. You will need to open Disk Management with administrator privileges. Right-click on the Start button, then choose Disk Management.

Step 2. In the Disk Management window, right-click the volume you want to change or add a drive letter. Then click "Change Drive Letter and Paths".

Step 3. Pick "Change" to alter the drive letter. Or pick "Add" to add a drive letter for drives without one.

Step 4. Choose a new drive letter, click "OK". The Disk Management will warn you that some programs might not run properly. Just close the window by clicking "Yes" to confirm.

Assign and Change Drive Letter with EaseUS Partition Manager

Your team is working on a project and you need to copy some files to a USB drive. But you have no idea what is the drive letter of the USB of your team. Most people have dealt with this issue before. As an easy solution, you can assign a drive letter to each driver using EaseUS Partition Master .

Users can manage disks with EaseUS Partition Manager without needing to go through a lengthy process. This program also provides advanced features such as  resize/move partition to solve low disk space issues, merge partitions, clone disk , create/delete/format partition, wipe data, disk/partition conversion, etc.

Now, free download this easy partition tool to assign drive letters with simple clicks.

Step 1.  Run EaseUS Partition Master, right-click the target partition, and choose "Change Drive Letter".

Step 2.  In the new window, click the down arrow and choose a drive letter for the partition from the drop-down menu, then click "OK".

Step 3.  Click the "Execute 1 Task(s)" button in the top-left corner, check the changes, and click "Apply" to change the drive letter of the selected partition.

Assign a Drive Letter Windows 10 Using Command Prompt

Windows Command Prompt can be used to assign drive letters to any directory on a computer. It especially benefits users with many storage devices connected to their computers. Below, we will show step-by-step how to change a drive letter with the command prompt.

Step 1. Access the elevated command prompt. Press Windows + S to run the search box. Type cmd . When the command prompt appears, right-click and select "Run as administrator".

Step 2. Type diskpart at the command prompt. Press Enter.

Step 3. Type list volume , then press Enter.

Step 4. Pay attention to the volume number of the drive you want to change the letter. Type select volume . Substitute volume number by the number of the volume inside the <>.

Step 5. Type assign letter . Substitute the new drive letter with the new letter for the drive inside the <>. Done. After finishing, you can close the command prompt.

You can assign different letters for your drivers in various ways. For example, with Windows Disk Management, and from the command prompt. But EaseUS partition manager gives you total control over your hard drive.

EaseUS Partition Master will assign a drive letter to any drive or partition and much more. Besides changing drive letters, you can also delete, split and wipe partitions. All without having to restart your PC several times or risk losing data. These features allow avoiding complicated procedures when working with multiple partitions.

How Can We Help You

Updated by Sherly 

Sherly joined EaseUS in 2022 and she has always loved writing articles and enjoys the fun they bring. She receives professional training here, focusing on product performance and other relative knowledge. She has written over 200 articles to help people overcome computing issues.

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Written by Cedric 

Cedric Grantham is a senior editor and data recovery specialist of EaseUS. He mainly writes articles and how-to tips about data recovery on PC and Mac. He has handled 10,000+ data recovery cases and is good at data recovery of NTFS, FAT (FAT32 and ExFAT) file systems, and RAID structure reorganization.

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I love that the changes you make with EaseUS Partition Master Free aren't immediately applied to the disks. It makes it way easier to play out what will happen after you've made all the changes. I also think the overall look and feel of EaseUS Partition Master Free makes whatever you're doing with your computer's partitions easy.

Partition Master Free can Resize, Move, Merge, Migrate, and Copy disks or partitions; convert to local, change label, defragment, check and explore partition; and much more. A premium upgrade adds free tech support and the ability to resize dynamic volumes.

It won't hot image your drives or align them, but since it's coupled with a partition manager, it allows you do perform many tasks at once, instead of just cloning drives. You can move partitions around, resize them, defragment, and more, along with the other tools you'd expect from a cloning tool.

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Home » Tech Tips » Windows » How to Assign or Change Drive Letter in Windows 11?

How to Assign or Change Drive Letter in Windows 11?

Windows by default uses C drive (C:) for hosting system and application files. You can choose different drives like D: instead of C: while installing Windows on your computer. Similarly, it is also possible to manually change the installed app’s location , though generally users install apps on C: drive. Did you anytime think of changing the existing drive letters in your system? Here is how you can do that in Windows 11 PC.

Default Drive Name Assignments in Windows 11

Let us say, you have two partitions C: and D: volumes on your hard disk. Here is how the default drive letter assignment in Windows work:

• A: – floppy disk drive for IBM computers (obsolete)
• B: – floppy drive for MS-DOS and Windows computers (obsolete)
• C: – Windows and app installation files
• D: – storage space partition
• E: – the letter after your storage partition for CD drive (if CD/DVD drive is available)
• F: onwards – removable storage disks like USB and external hard disks

When you have more partitions on the hard drive, system will use the next drive letters like E: or F: when you insert an external drive. For example, when you have C: and D: drives on your hard disk and insert an USB drive , it will take the letter E: or later.

Changing Drive Letters in Windows 11

It is not necessary to live with the assigned drive letters forever on your system. You can either reduce / increase the drive’s space and assign new letters or simply change an existing drive’s letter. For example, you have 400GB D: drive which you can simply change to F: drive. Alternatively, you can divide it into 200GB + 200GB drives and name them as G: and H: drives.

Windows 11 makes it easy to change the drive letters from the Settings app without using registry or changing system files. However, you can also do the same from Computer Management as with the case in Windows 10 .

1. Change Drive Letter from Windows 11 Settings

If you want to change the assigned drive letters for any partition on your hard disk except C drive then this is the option you should proceed with.

• Press “Win + I” keys or use Windows Search to find Windows Settings app.
• Once you are in the Settings app, go to “System” tab and then click on “Storage” option.

• Go down to the bottom of the “Storage” settings section and click on “Advanced storage settings” available under “Storage management” section.

• This will expand the section and click on “Disks & volumes” option.

• The “Disks and volumes” section will show all your existing drives and click on the one you want to change the letter name. it will show two buttons – “Explore” and “Properties” and click on the “Properties” button.

• On the next screen, you can see the buttons for “Change label” and “Change drive letter”.

• Click “Change drive letter” button and select your favorite letter from the dropdown to assign.

The dropdown will show all letters except C: and the current volume. In the above example, we want to change the D: drive and the system shows A to Z letters except C and D. Since D is the current volume, it is not shown in the list. But C is not shown because it is a system volume partition and you cannot change the drive letter for C. You will not see “Change drive letter” button when selecting properties of C drive. However, you can assign A and B for drive letters which were once reserved only for floppy disks. Since floppy disk is obsolete Windows allows you to assign those reserved drive letters A and B also.

2. Change Drive Letter from Disk Management in Windows 11

Though changing drive letter is easy with Windows Settings, it does not allow changing C drive letter. You can use Disk Management app for changing any drive letter with additional features.

• Press “Win + R” keys to Run prompt .
• Type compmgmt.msc and press “OK” button.

• This will open Computer Management app and select “Disk Management” from the sidebar available under “Storage” section.
• You will see all the drives available on your computer and select C or D or any drive that you want to assign a new letter.
• Go to “Action > All Tasks > Change Drive Letter and Paths…” menu.

• On the pop-up that appears, click on “Change…” button.

• Click on the dropdown against “Assign the following drive letter:” option.
• Select your favorite letter and click “OK” button.

Here you will see all the drive letters except D which is already assigned to another partition volume on the hard disk. Though it is possible to change drive letter for C, we do not recommend as it can affect the installed programs on your computer. Most programs by default install under “Program Files” section in C drive. Changing the drive letter may affect the installed programs and they may stop working. In such a case, you need to uninstall and reinstall the program on the new drive again. This will be a big task if multiple programs stopped working. Therefore, choose the system drive when you clean install Windows first time and stick with that. If you are using preinstalled Windows on C drive, then continue to use that without changing. You can change all other drives using Disk Management or Windows Settings app.

If you want to create parition, select the volume and right click on it. From the menu, select “Shrink Volume” option and select the reduced size for your volume. The remaining size will become unallocated for which you can assign a new label and letter as explained above. Learn more about how to create disk paritions in Windows computer .

Assigning Drive Letter to Removable Disks

As mentioned, Windows will assign the available drive letter for removable disks after the current partition volumes. The problem is when you have multiple removable disks, the assigned letters will change every time which may confuse you. The good part is that you can assign a drive letter as explained above for your removable USB or external hard disk. Windows will remember the assigned letter and use the same whenever you insert the external drive. However, make sure to use the letters clearly away from the current and CD/DVD drives. For example, you can use X or Y or even A or B which are generally not assigned.

About Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WebNots are team of experts who love to build websites, find tech hacks and share the learning with community.

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Windows Tip: Assign Permanent Letters to Removable Drives

Each time you plug in a USB drive or SD card in a PC, Windows gives it a dynamic alphabetic letter. Here’s how to give your drive(s) a permanent letter.

Windows will assign drive letters to external flash drives, SD cards, and other removable storage devices dynamically as you plug them in. If you use many different external storage devices throughout the day, having different letters assigned each time can become annoying and make things feel unorganized. Here’s how to assign permanent letters to each device to make things easier.

Add Permanent Drive Letters to Removeable Storage

Windows progresses through the alphabet (sans A and B) to assign drive letters to devices as you plug them in. So if you plug in a USB flash drive to get data from it, it might be F: but the next time you plug it in, it might be E: or G: depending on the order you plug them in.

The neat thing is you can assign a permanent letter to a USB drive directly with Windows 7, 8.1, and Windows 10. It’s an easy process, and there’s no need to install any third-party utility.

Assign a Specific Drive Letter in Windows

1. To set this up, plug in the drive that you want to assign a permanent letter. Then open the Run dialog ( Windows Key+R ) and type:  compmgmt.msc and hit Enter or click OK.

Or, right-click the Start button to bring up the hidden quick access menu in Windows 10 or 8.1 and select Computer Management .

2. Once that’s open, choose Disk Management in the left pane under Storage. It will take a few seconds while Windows looks for the drives currently connected to your PC and displays them in the right pane.

3. Right-click the drive you want to assign a permanent letter to and then choose Change Drive Letter and Paths from the menu.

4. A dialog box will open up, and here you need to click the Change button. Then make sure that Assign the following drive letter is selected and choose the letter you want to give it. Click OK and close out of Computer Management.

Now, each time you plug that drive into your PC, it will register with the drive letter you gave it.

39 Comments

March 31, 2016 at 7:33 am

This IS NOT permanent. Windows will still change them randomly. Again I repeat THIS IS NOT PERMANENT

April 27, 2016 at 4:41 am

this tutorial is rubbish. i have done this many times, windows still changes the drive letter. this is not permament at all!!!

May 14, 2016 at 5:20 am

Same experience as the other two users. I had changed my drive letter for a USB drive through disk management and it was working great for quite some time when suddenly today the drive letter was changed.

What I did notice is I had my e-reader connected before I turned on the USB drive (which had the letter assigned). Suddenly my e-reader has the assigned letter from the USB drive.

So… NOT PERMANENT AT ALL unless you turn on your drive with the “permanent letter” first.

Kumar Abhirup

May 31, 2016 at 4:52 am

Thanx, this helped me a lot.

August 30, 2022 at 10:27 am

For a while …

September 13, 2016 at 6:21 am

Nope. Windows 10 changes it if I plug in a different usb drive first.

October 8, 2016 at 12:29 am

This doesn’t work at all. You can change the drive letter from there, but if you unplug your unit and plug another one, windows will assign the previous letter to the new unit nonetheless. This is so annoying.

Pablo Guerrero

December 10, 2016 at 10:08 am

I usually have to use the Disk Management utility to correct the mess that Windows makes with drive letters. The most annoying thing is that Windows even changes the drive letters of those external disks that haven’t been unplugged.

Plugged to my laptop I always have an external diskdrive that always should be E: But if I have a SD card inserted in the SD drive and boot up the computer then the SD card is assigned E: and the always plugged (never unplugged) diskdrive is re-assigned as G: which is annoying since I have an application that looks for its overlays and databases on drive E:

Is there a way to say Windows that a used drive letter (like E:) is not available for dynamic drive letter assignment?

February 21, 2017 at 4:13 pm

Try assigning a letter well away from ABCDEF, like Z. This way windows won’t automatically reassign your letter when more drives are connected.

Steve Krause

February 22, 2017 at 10:38 am

Exactly what I do Will. Great tip.

Brian Burgess

May 2, 2017 at 8:00 pm

This is a great point, Will. I’ll upgrade the article to include your tip. Thanks!

July 8, 2017 at 12:47 am

It worked for a while. Then letters were changed after some days… again! :-(

April 29, 2024 at 7:39 am

That doesn’t work either.

MyTechMaster

March 1, 2017 at 4:47 pm

What Will says is true. If you assign the last letters of the alphabet to your external drives Windows will ALWAYS REMEMBER AND NEVER OVERWRITE THEM. Just don’t assign two of your external drives the same drive letter and this will work 100% of the time for you. Peace!

September 14, 2021 at 3:18 pm

((( NYM ))) after 30 years, still solving the world’s problems! another perfect answer. worked grrrrrreat! thank you my dear! see you in one of your forums helping folks soon! thank you thank you❗❗❗❗ zack

Sandy Lemberg

September 14, 2021 at 6:39 pm

Unless you have more than 26 external drives.

March 19, 2017 at 8:12 am

It is too late to assign a drive letter near the end of the alphabet. I have done a lot of work that uses drive letter E: I would have to redo all of this to change it to Z:

Surely, Microsoft would have a tool to assign drives permanently.

May 10, 2017 at 6:51 am

John, change your other drives to z,y,x, etc. then when the PC boots or you insert another drive/flash, it will be at the end and not take your E: drives spot.

April 1, 2017 at 9:23 am

With all the cracks in Windows I don’t see why there isn’t another “standard” OS that’s just as easy (or easier) and plug-n-play, that actually uses “memory” to remember stuff like drive letters. Or window size and placement. Or “Yes I’m sure” and “Yes I did click on ‘yes i’m sure'” and “No, I’m not a Robot…you are” and not to ask me to not ever show something again, every time…etc.

June 25, 2017 at 4:43 am

There is a shareware application which addresses this, though it’s intended for computer engineers and system administrators, not regular users. You can configure it to map drive letters according to DeviceIDs and other really permanent data. It runs as a service, to it autostarts with Windows. However, there’s no graphical interface. Everything has to be coded on an INI file, which is highly technical.

The software is called USBDLM is it’s free for private and educational uses. It’s available at Softpedia and other software archives.

July 7, 2017 at 8:25 am

The first 2 replies here are annoying. This works 100% unless you have gone and relettered multiple devices to the same letter. In that event only 1 (one) of the devices will acquire the desired letter and always the first. When the second device is plugged in Windows sees that the desired letter is use and uses the next available letter. You cannot give 2 devices the same letter, ever. Get over it.

Sheesh. I despise idiots.

If you’re using flash drives, think about reassigning them to A or B; these letters are still available and never used because no one has a floppy drive anymore. This way they can never get in the way of a letter you desire for an external drive.

For the idiot who programmed access to a database on an external drive, something that should never be done precisely because of drive letter changes, you either need to make sure the external drive is always assigned that letter or mount the drive into an empty NTFS folder to eliminate drive letter access. The only other thing you can do is manually assign a letter to the SD drive so it doesn’t take your precious E.

Computers should be more like cars and require an operator’s license, there’d be so many less morons trying to use a computer.

July 8, 2017 at 12:53 am

Some people at this forum really need a sex life, learning some manners, or probably both.

Noway Nohow

November 30, 2017 at 7:23 am

Hey Annoyed, your communication skills are annoying. Your tack is repugnant unless that is who you are as you go through life. Also, having a mobile drive that is being plugged into different employee’s computers does not make it practical to assign it under the user’s NTFS folder – especially if ACL’s are used for data security. One never sounds professional when they’re yelling/insulting.

July 7, 2020 at 10:33 am

This is why they invented File Servers, and NAS. Anyone you allow on your network can access, permissions always the same. Mobile hard drives are subject to Shaking, Shocking, Possibly dropping, and possibly locking.

Tact* and once upon a time it was understood that highly technical people have put most of their education and self-education into making their computer work instead of making people feel good about the way that we talk.

Annoyed set his name to Annoyed for good reason. It’s blatantly obvious to anyone willing to peruse that 6 out of the first 7 commentators DID NOT READ THE ARTICLE, in which the author specifically explains that drives like E:\ and F:\ will get rewritten as part of windows norm so you should “Permanently” set on letters far away from those so they don’t get reset:: ” When assigning your drive letter, make sure to choose a letter toward the end of the alphabet list. For example, X, Y, or Z — otherwise Windows has the tendency to eventually assign a different letter. Also, keep in mind that it will only be the assigned letter on the computer you changed it on. If you take your external drive to a different PC, Windows will give it a different dynamic letter. ” – The article you should have just read.

Being annoyed about people using computers badly is valid. Some of us work really hard to be professional and do things by best-practice so that solutions work long-term and no one has to guess at the state.

Then you read an article like this where most of the comments did not even bother to read the main text before complaining, and everyone else is doing backwoods duck-tape solutions.

ALSO WTF happened to the internet where now we’re all supposed to sound professional?

September 11, 2021 at 6:35 am

Finally I too fought this for years on many machines that I work on and finally I decided I would try this::::::: I decided I would go into safe mode and as administrator allocate a certain letter Z or x or y for these external SSD drives that I have to work with and then I rebooted and it never ever ever ever came back .

that was the solution I did a couple years ago and I’ve done it to all the machines I work on since and it’s perfect. Forever gone.

July 18, 2017 at 6:38 am

Thanks so much for the clear instructions.

August 3, 2017 at 6:58 am

This seems to work for me. I’ve assigned permanent letters a while ago and so far they’re not changing. I did assign only one of the four drives a letter towards the end of the alphabet, but the others are from A to E. Also, I gave each of the drives unique names.

August 21, 2017 at 4:22 am

I have three computers and three USB HDs. On each computer I have assigned these drives (for historical reasons) the letters G:, M: and O: respectively. D: is a partition on the internal HD and E: is the optical disc burner, so if I plug in any other USB device it usually comes up as F:. I find that these drive assignments stick . . . most of the time! Very occasionally one of the USB HDs comes up as F:. There appears to be no rhyme nor reason; but, hey!, it’s Windows, isn’t it, so that’s no real surprise. I just have to go into Disk Management to change it back and it usually behaves itself well for the next few weeks or months. Nothing, really, to get hot under the collar about.

September 14, 2021 at 2:11 am

That is exactly my experience, except I also have P and Q drives. I assigned these letters at a time when I had a multiple card reader occupying drive letters H to L. Goodness knows why the G drive occasionally gets reassigned as F, but it happens so infrequently that it’s no real inconvenience.

November 22, 2017 at 12:04 pm

Change drive letter is grayed out on my system. I am an administrator on the PC

Edward Bear

November 22, 2017 at 4:30 pm

You can use the command line program diskpart to change the driver letter: 1. open command prompt 2. type “diskpart” (in these instructions do not type the quotation marks), press Enter 3. type “list volumes” , press Enter 4. identify the volume number associated with the drive whose letter you wish to change – assume this is volume “N” 5. type “select volume N” (replacing N with appropriate volume number) then press Enter 6. type “assign letter=L” (replacing L with the appropriate new drive letter) then press Enter 7. type “exit” then press Enter to close diskpart and return to command prompt.

August 30, 2018 at 2:33 am

This works fine for me, even if changing Drive Letter is greyed out by our IT

January 7, 2018 at 4:20 am

You never said what to do if its when you try to change it its grayed out. I cant give it a letter. What do I do?

March 24, 2018 at 8:56 pm

Jay, when a drive letter is grayed out, it has already been assigned to another drive. Find out which drive has the letter you want to use and then change it’s letter to Z. This will free up the old drive letter and it will no longer be grayed out.

March 24, 2018 at 8:42 pm

This annoying problem could easily be avoided if the whole concept of drive letters was abandoned. Each drive should have a distinctive drive name (or number) assigned by the user. Drives should then optionally be listed alphabetically or numerically by Windows. I don’t know who started this drive A:\, B:\, C:\, etc. concept but in today’s computing world, it’s obsolete and unnecessary. As it stands now, you can choose to not assign a drive letter during formatting but if you do that, they will not list when you click “This Computer”. It makes you wonder what they are smoking.

March 30, 2019 at 5:39 am

Would really like to know how to assign a drive letter PER DEVICE, please

example. (this) thumb is always K (this thumb drive) is always L.

not the drive slot itself, but device.

January 27, 2021 at 6:05 pm

For years I’ve been using A: for my built-in SD Card reader, and E: through K: for specific external hard drives and specific thumb drives. I went through computer management to set all that up and it worked for years. For reasons that I cannot work out, my SD Card reader is automatically assigned E: whenever I put in any SD card, including the exact same SD card and/or reboot my computer. Even when I change the drive letter on the SD Card reader back to A: and reboot my computer, the drive letter is once again reset to E: by the computer even when there are no other drives of any kind attached to the computer before or after attempting to assign the SD Card reader to A:. I’ve since tried updating all the drivers, a couple of which have updated, and the problem persists. While I have upgraded one of my external drives recently, I cannot see how that would cause the problem especially since it is not the first time that I’ve replaced an external drive and assigned the new drive to the drive letter of the drive it replaced. I am not running any new software, so as far as I can tell it isn’t a software conflict. My system is set up such that the drive letters I have been assigning need to remain what I assigned them. (I’ve already assigned my DVD-ROM drive to Z:, and even that isn’t working properly now.) Once up a time using Computer Management might have “permanently” reassigned the drive letters, since 1/25/2020 that is apparently no longer the case. I need to find another solution that works.

Being old school and having started out on DOS computers with 5.25″ floppy drives, the lettering of the drives is not a problem to me in and of itself, and it makes no particular difference to me if the lettering of drives is ultimately done away with, but until that time we must work with the tools we have. So any help would be appreciated in resolving this.

June 13, 2023 at 8:40 am

At this moment I have the same problem with two USB drives installed in my router. Suddenly the original assigned letters changed and that played havoc in my desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

I agree with protesters. The letter assigning system is obsolete and it seems to me that nobody cares. Ok, let’s accept that A,B,C,D is used by the OS, but why not also use proper names for removable devices, let say movies, music1, music2, personal-letters or whatever. Of course if you assign the same name to two different USB drives that’s your problem.

June 21, 2023 at 1:54 pm

I do not have this problem.

1. Use high up letters — not D, E, etc, but P, Q, etc.

2. If you get an unwanted change, use Disk Management to change back

3 Use Windows 7. Who knows what Windows 10 or 11 will try to do to your system.

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Steps to change a drive letter in windows.

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Network Drive Letter Assignment Best Practices

We are working on migrating from Novell to Active Directory. During the transition, We are going to evaluate our drive mappings in light of current standards to see if what we have been doing still fits, is in alignment with best practices, simplify administration of the resources, etc. At present, we have 11 different drive mappings that are mapped. This seems, to me, to be a few too many and rather confusing for end users. These drive mappings also appear to relate to some older convention that existed in the organization that ended being something like the following:

• K:\ - Mapping of physical CD-ROM drive of Novell server
• N:\ - IT administrative scripts and utilities
• S:\ - Another user's home folder, if needed
• T:\ - dBase III mapping (this should hopefully disappear after the migration)
• U:\ - Project or other group shares
• V:\ - Project or other group shares
• W:\ - Work (departmental or unit work share)
• X:\ - Applications share
• Y:\ - Home folder
• Z:\ - System volume

This is a very confusing structure for users, both end users and IT, within our organization. I would like to ask for industry best practices and how others design their drive mappings. What are some things that one should be aware of and how do you compensate or control those items? What are things that should be considered from a management and maintenance perspective?

Our clients are going to be Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 7 Pro, and Windows Server 2008. Later on we would like to incorporate Linux and Macintosh OS X (10.6 or newer) clients into our drive mappings as well.

Any help, ideas, resources, or links that you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

• best-practices
• drive-letters

7 Answers 7

We faced this exact question for the exact same reason a year and a half ago. The main problems are threefold:

• Novell networks are historically drive-letter based. Everyone knows that the U: drive is for their user's home directory and S: is for Shared. And so on.
• Microsoft networks are much less attached to drive-letters and Microsoft has been pushing UNC style addressing since the advent of Active Directory. Long-established Microsoft houses tend to use whatever is at hand for drive letters, with a few standard ones for old apps that require a drive-letter.
• Users haaaaaaate changing established procedures. They simply will NOT throw drive-letters over the side in favor of UNCs, and will continue to call the helpdesk with "The Y: drive is down."

Because of 1 and 3, we were still using drive letters a year after our Microsoft migration. Users are slooowly getting used to UNC addressing for a few things, but our Shared volume, a massive, monolithic volume, needed to be split up due to size reasons on the SAN. Rather than force everyone to deal with UNCs, we figured out how to do directory-mounted volumes in a cluster.

If you have the option (such as very few Mac users) Microsoft DFS can make things a lot easier here. Create a single drive-letter, with the top-level directories being, in essence, the old drive-letter mapping. In a pure Windows environment this can work well. Anything that uses Samba, though, can't use it. Users just have a single drive letter, and the move from 14 drive-letters to a single one with paths like "S:\K-Drive\" is dead easy. We have a lot of Mac users, so couldn't go this route.

The drive-letters we have standardized in our login-script (another hold-over from the Novell days):

• P: = The monolithic Shared volume
• S: = Student classwork volume (usage slowly decreasing as everything moves to Blackboard)
• U: = Home directory
• W: = End-user software repository
• X: = Certain network-installed software packages, mainly focused around our ERP system
• Y: = Admin scripts and things

We also operated a drive-letter registry in our Windows Admin group. If a drive gets mapped in a login script, it gets documented who is doing it. This saves a lot of grief if two departments want to map a T: drive to different places, and happen to share staff.

The standards I can recommend are:

• Keep centrally mandated drive letters to a minimum.
• Operate a drive-letter registry in your overall Admin coordination group
• If needed, periodically audit your drive-mapping methods against what you expect them to be.

In my own humble-opinion, if you can get past the concept of "drive-letters"... forget them altogether. UNC paths can take you a lot further, and you won't run into naming collisions. You may also want to consolidate your various server names & shares into a single (or a few) DFS roots. That will provide a single UNC path to turn to in order to find any & all relevant shares for the users... and provide options to setup replication, fail-over, and scalability.

• 2 This is a great point about UNC paths, but I invariably run into massive training issues getting non-technical people to use them. Even in my own dept where we're a mix of techs and technical business analysts it is a stumbling block. –  squillman Apr 13, 2011 at 15:10
• This is a great idea actually. not one I'd considered in previous projects. Perhaps have a mapped 'User' drive (U:\ ?), and when further drive access is needed simply have helpdesk drop a preconfigured shortcut to \\SERVER\ShareRequired$\ in the U: drive. Therefore a new 'Project' drive, often a short lived requirement, can simply be dropped in, called something useful, and easily managed. Also works nicely where you have permission issues for secondary access within secured folders. +1 for the tip. –  Patrick Apr 13, 2011 at 15:19
• Using DFS, would one want to make the folder hierarchy more flat and wide or does depth of levels matter? –  John Apr 13, 2011 at 15:19
• In my experience... it doesn't matter too much. Obviously, the deeper you go, the more trouble users have finding stuff. On slow links, there might be issues with lookups & such, but I wouldn't expect it to be too much. –  TheCompWiz Apr 13, 2011 at 15:31
• @Patrick - that is a good idea that I had not thought of. It would definitely make adding all of those one-off drive letter mappings for special groups, committees, and projects easier to manage. I wonder what the permissions implications would be and how tough it would be to manage? –  John Apr 13, 2011 at 15:31

Keep C: as the system volume. As much as I can't believe it still happens, it does still happen where software is hardcoded to install to C: (those devs should be shot).

Keep the next few after C: (E:, F:, G:) reserved for physical devices (CD/DVD, removable media, etc).

Beyond that, I try and match things with what they start with (obviously with limited degrees of success as the number of drive mappings increases).

H: = Home drive P: = Project drive or Personal Drive etc...

• +1 Came here to write this. I'm not aware of an industry standard except for A: B: C: and perhaps D:. The rest, I've basically tried to align with their function. In all the places I've worked, that had shares implemented, H was universally the HOMEDRIVE. –  GregD Apr 13, 2011 at 15:08

I use N: for NETWORK. It gets mapped to a DFS hierarchiy that spans multipel servers in a transparent folder structure for users.

I use other letters as appropriate on servers (X: = dataa, S=Sql, T= Temp, L=logs - note this is for servers, so TEMP is the dricve for the temp databases).

Users normally always only ever see the one tree. There are two others for techncial reasons (not mapped).

We mainly use the P: drive for the user's Personal drive. And an S: drive for company share. Those are the two main drive letters we use.

One good practice since you'll be using Active Directory is to use Group Policy Objects to decide who will get a drive letter and who won't. You can set login scripts to map a shared drive based on a security group filter.

For instance, you have a billing department that needs access to a Q: drive. You would setup a new GPO that would have the login script to map the Q drive, and have security filter apply to the Billing_security_group, so they will be the only ones that get the Q drive.

More information about security group filtering here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781988(WS.10).aspx

• Do you see any problems with reusing certain drive letters for different departments/functional areas within an organization? For example, we assign drive letter M to the Personnel Management team as a secured area for them and then reuse drive letter M for the facilities management team's secured area. –  John Apr 13, 2011 at 15:14
• @John: That will only lead to continued confusion. What happens when someone in the Personnel Management department tells someone in the Facilities Management department that the document they're looking for is on the M: drive? It's also going to lead to continued administrative overhead by having to manage multiple logon scripts, needlessly complex logon scripts, or multiple GPO preference settings based on user, department, etc. KIS should be your first mandate. –  joeqwerty Apr 13, 2011 at 15:21

See my comment on squillmans post.

In one environment that I support:

• H: Homedrive
• G: Common Drive (broken up into folders for each division)
• I: IT drive

I would also add that you probably want to implement Access Based Enumeration when you move to Windows. Novell handles this natively, but this will not let users see any files or folders they don't have access to.

• Are there any concerns or things that we should be aware of when using Access Based Enumeration on Windows? I have a vague memory of someone telling me that it does not work quite like it does on Novell and that it is a challenge to manage correctly. Thanks for the ideas. –  John Apr 13, 2011 at 15:16
• I don't find ABE any more challenging to manage but there is some user education required as users may/will get confused when userA in Finance can't see the same things that userB in HR can see. –  joeqwerty Apr 13, 2011 at 15:24
• 1 @John - from my recollection, you "just turn it on"(tm). There is no management of it. It's either on/off. I've had no concerns with it and it's never been an issue. Keep in mind that it's not a substitute for proper permissions.. –  GregD Apr 13, 2011 at 15:25
• Does ABE work well with DFS like some of the other posters are suggesting to be used? I am worried about trying to sort through permissions, troubleshooting, auditing to make sure that the user is seeing what they should be seeing and nothing more, etc. –  John Apr 13, 2011 at 15:25
• 1 @John, we don't use DFS. Having said that, ABE is just an enhancement to proper permissions. Always, always, always, plan for proper permissions. ABE will enhance that. –  GregD Apr 13, 2011 at 15:27

Don't map a user-specific directory. Redirect their "My Documents" folder to a network share using a GPO.

Then ask some business questions to the company. How to people work, what kind of information do they deal with on a shared/group level. Pick a couple of the big ones (departments, clients, projects) and map drives to the top level of each of those directories.

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Opinion | Aldermen: Halt all work on the DuSable Lake…

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• Clarence Page

Opinion | Aldermen: Halt all work on the DuSable Lake Shore Drive project

Because of the trajectory of the project as an urban highway without significant mass transit elements, we are calling for a halt to planning events, public meetings and other work related to the project. We believe the project would benefit from meetings with members of the City Council to discuss our oversight role as elected officials and our vision for DuSable Lake Shore Drive.

Together, our growing coalition represents hundreds of thousands of Chicago residents. We consider Lake Michigan among our city’s greatest resources. DuSable Lake Shore Drive should serve as a gateway to our lakefront and our communities. It should be a multiplier when it comes to supporting commuters, small businesses, commerce and recreation. We believe this project as currently proposed does not represent our communities’ interests and the long-term viability, accessibility, and value of our neighborhoods and lakefront.

This is our vision for DuSable Lake Shore Drive: a smaller, more efficient footprint that includes sustainable, multimodal 21st-century transportation solutions to accommodate all users and provide safe and easy access to our lakefront parks and other resources. We oppose all versions of the proposal that fail to incorporate mass transit elements such as buses or light rail. We want modern solutions that prioritize non-car travel and put pedestrians, cyclists, public transit users, recreation, green space, commercial growth and property values ahead of cars.

Faced with opportunities to remake urban roadways, cities across the world are opting to downsize and implement modern and sustainable engineering practices to reimagine, overhaul and dramatically improve on existing conditions. Chicago deserves better than a cosmetic redo on DuSable Lake Shore Drive.

As currently configured, DuSable Lake Shore Drive is a dangerous roadway, and Redefine The Drive fails to make it safer. According to traffic crash reporting from the Chicago Police Department, since 2018, DuSable Lake Shore Drive has been the scene of more than 14,000 crashes, or an average of seven crashes every single day. These crashes — which have even affected users on the Lakefront Trail — resulted in more than 3,500 injuries, including 505 incapacitating injuries, and 40 fatalities. The economic cost of these crashes is estimated at more than half a billion dollars. A 2018 report indicated 95% of drivers exceed speed limits when DuSable Lake Shore Drive is not congested.

While we in the City Council are making difficult policy decisions to reverse an increasing number of crashes and roadway deaths, this project represents a step back when it comes to the safety on our lakefront.

In 2020, the City Council declared that Chicago is in a climate crisis, a status that is supported by scientists and other experts. Mayor Brandon Johnson has stated that Chicago needs to take a “strong stand to mitigate climate disaster” and be a “leader in sustainability.” This project does not make Chicago greener. It does not advance even basic suggested environmentally sound practices related to emissions, microplastic tire pollution, green infrastructure or sustainability. Bigger roads mean more cars, greenhouse gases and pollution.

We further take issue with the process that has resulted in a narrow range of project options. Unlike elected officials, state agencies and vendors are not directly accountable to the residents of the city of Chicago. Each alderman represents more than 50,000 residents, we have broad discretion regarding our wards, and we will not let outside parties work against the long-term interests of our residents.

Our understanding is that, while construction on this unfunded multibillion-dollar project is many years away, all options that include significant mass transit elements have been categorically eliminated from consideration by IDOT. DuSable Lake Shore Drive is not a commercial roadway: Trucks are banned, and it is primarily used for passenger vehicle trips.

Modern, reliable mass transit is superior to cars at moving people. Mass transit is the only means of sustainably addressing congestion and should be prioritized accordingly. A new DuSable Lake Shore Drive without a mass transit element is a nonstarter for us.

Our growing coalition includes nearly a dozen aldermen and numerous community organizations. We stand with the members of the Illinois General Assembly who unanimously voted in favor of a resolution sponsored by Rep. Kam Buckner and co-sponsored by all Chicago lakefront representatives who share our positions on DuSable Lake Shore Drive. We look forward to further discussions among stakeholders as we seek a better lakefront for all Chicagoans.

Angela Clay, 46th, Timmy Knudsen, 43rd, Bennett Lawson, 44th, and Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth, 48th, are members of Chicago’s City Council.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected] .

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