Changing drive letters in XP
I want to swap some drive letters around in XP Home Edition. I found previous threads in this forum and thought I'd cracked it. So, I changed drive letter H to X, wanting to then assign the letter H to another drive. After I rebooted, the letters had changed as I had instructed.
But then when I tried to change another drive letter to the now-available H, H wasn't shown in the drop-down list of letters and I wasn't able to type it in manually.
Any advice please? Is this a known problem with XP? Is there a better bit of (free) software I should be using to do the job?
Before you modify drive-letter assignments, note the following items:
Changing the drive letter of the system volume or the boot volume is not inherent to Disk Management.
Many MS-DOS-based and Windows-based programs make references to a specific drive letter (for example, environment variables). If you modify the drive letter, these programs may not function correctly.
click here;en-us;307844
Close up the (http: //)space when pasting the address.
http: //support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307844
Jim.
I have a dual boot system, and in Win 98 the drive letters were allocated differently when I installed a IDE extension card. I would like them to be the same in 98 and XP, and changing them in XP seemed to be the simplest way.
[email protected]@m & Jim.
That's the exact Microsoft instructions I was following. The problem is, the unused letter hasn't been made available for subsequent re-use.
In disk management, do a double check just to make sure that H has not automatically moved up 1 place and been assigned to another drive.
This happened to me and I could not understand why I couldn't find letter F looked at the window for ages trying to find it, then noticed it was already in use and so would not show up in the drop down menu. j.
Djohn. Good point, I'll put my glasses on tonight.
Spot on! But the problem now is that H was automatically reallocated to my DVD drive when I changed disk drive letter H to X -- but XP Disk Management utility only displays and manages the HDDs, not floppy, CD and DVD drives (it was only when I looked at my computer in Explorer that I saw the problem). So here's me trying to achieve one objective, and in the background Bill Gates is quietly trying to make sure I don't, by closing the gap that I'd deliberately created!
So, if Windows Disk Management can't do the job, is there a 3rd-party utility that can change the drive letters of any or all drives?
I've changed my DVD and CDR drive letters in XP Home without a problem (R:\ & W:\). They're both displayed in Disk Management but you need to right click in the bottom of the display not the top.
If this is what you require, my XP guide states:
"You may need to reorganise volume lables or paths at different times and the Disk Management console makes these changes easy.
For instance, if you have a volume labelled Drive H and want to assign that volume to an empty NTFS folder, giving it a friendly name such as Documents so as to be able to store all kinds of company documents on that volume, sharing it to the network, the change is straightforward.
Right click the volume you want to change and then click Change Drive Letter and Path. Select the volume you want to change and click the Change button; a dialogue box will appear allow the desired change."
If I'm on the wrong track, apologies...:-)
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