As you know, a computer independently assigns a letter to a disk or other connected drive. But there are situations when the user may not be satisfied with the value selected by the system. For example, a person got used to the fact that the CD-ROM has the letter "F", and when you reinstall the system, it suddenly became "E", and one of the hard drives assigned the letter from the CD-ROM device.
But do not rush to be upset. This is all fixable, and in this article I will talk in detail about how to change the drive letter (for CD-ROM, hard drive, card reader or flash drive). And for this you do not need to use any third-party software, since this can be done using standard operating system tools. In my case, it's XP.
So, you can change the drive letter to any unoccupied (from C to Z). As for A and B, these characters are reserved for floppy drives. But since these devices have not been installed on computers and laptops recently, these letters can be assigned to one or another removable media, such as flash drives, for example. As for the letter "C", then it is usually assigned to the system hard drive, so it will not be in the list of available ones.
It is also worth mentioning that you can change the drive letter not only with the standard Windows software. If you are a supporter of the Acronis Disk Director, GiParted utility and other similar software, you can also perform this procedure. But we will consider this with the example of the standard Microsoft method.
In order to change the drive letter, start the start menu, where activate the control panel, and then in the window that appears, find the service called administration. Double-click on it, open a tab called "Disk Management". Imagine that we need to change the drive letter for some removable media, such as a flash drive. It must be inserted into the port in advance.
So, when the service responsible for managing disks starts , activate the necessary flash drive from the list, after which you should select the function of changing the letter or path to the device from the menu. When the following window opens, click on the edit button, select one of the available unoccupied letters. Confirm your selection with the OK button. After this step, you will see a warning and a question about whether you really want to change the drive letter. Confirm your action, after which the selected letter will be assigned to this flash drive.
But what if you need to swap drive letters? No problems. Use some intermediate letter, and the sequence of actions will be the same as described above. The only thing you should understand is that this method cannot replace the letter assigned to the system drive, that is, the one on which all the files of your operating system are located. To do this, you will need to change the registry entries of Windows. This should be done very carefully, since it will require reinstalling the system in case of an error.