Summary: Drive letters, like C:, D: and so on are assigned by Windows to reference your hard disks. They are not cast in stone: drive letters can be changed.
I have 2 hard disc drives and a cd rom drive on my computer. The HDDs are C and E, and the cd rom drive is D. Is it possible to swap the HDD letters, i.e C becomes E and E becomes C? Or are the letters fixed at the time of format?
Drive letters are not assigned at format time, and yes, they can be changed. In fact, it's quite easy to change them, and I do it all the time.
For every drive except "C:", that is. "C:" is special.
First let's look at the how.
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The utility we want to run to manage our disk drives is, surprisingly enough, the disk manager.
Right click on My Computer and click on Manage and you should see something very much like this:
Now, click on Disk Management, and you should see something like this (You may need to resize the window larger, as I have, in order to see everything):
You'll see that I have several disks listed ... C: is my system drive, E: is my external USB/Firewire backup drive, F: and G: are drives representing the slots in a small 8-in-1 memory card reader. Off the screen also is D:, my DVD/CD drive.
To change the drive letter assigned to a drive, right click on the drive in disk manager. For example here I've right clicked on my E: drive:
Click on Change Drive Letter and Paths... and you'll get this dialog:
You can guess where this is headed by now ... click on he Change... button for this dialog:
In the picture above I've already clicked on the dropdown list that will allow me to select which of the available drive letters I want to assign.
Since you can only assign to unused drive letters, swapping is a three step process. Say we wanted to swap D: and E: -
assign the disk known as D: to any unused letter, say Z:, which frees up D:.
assign the disk known as E: to D:, which frees up E:.
assign the disk now known as Z: to E:, and you're done.
An important word about C:
I don't recommend that you ever use the disk management tool to try to rename C:. C: is, most likely, where Windows is installed, and Windows will not respond well at all to the drive letter being changed out from underneath it.
There's also a good chance that this will not do what you want anyway. The Disk Management utility only affects how Windows looks at the drives - it won't change which drive you boot from, since booting happens before Windows has access to this information.
While there are utilities out there to move things around, changing your boot drive is best and most reliably done before you install Windows. That way the drive you want to be C: is color: from the start, and Windows is installed to it from the beginning. My approach to changing the boot drive on a running machine would be just that - I'd wait until I was going to reinstall Windows for some other reason, and do it at that time.
Exactly how you change your boot drive is typically either a BIOS setting, a disk drive jumper setting, or a combination of both. In any case, it's specific to the machine you have and the drives you happen to have installed.
Related:
Ask Leo! - I have no C: drive, but some programs insist on it. What can I do?
Ask Leo! - Can I move Windows from one hard drive to another?
Ask Leo! - I can't format my hard drive - it keep telling me "volume is in use by another process" -- why?
Article C2743 - August 4, 2006
ok i got a dell 1100 inspiron won't read dvd/cd rom i tryed updating driver, roll back,and last but not least changing the drive letter. i was thinking unstilling the software and redownloading from dell s website u got any other methods i could try???
Posted by: ninekiller at March 16, 2008 1:48 PMhi i have an ifriends computer and i just installed a super multi dvd rewriter but now its sayin cd drive file system unknown and i have zero bytes on my drive d im not to good with computers so im kind of stuck is there something i have dones wrong please help if u can thanks!!
Posted by: mathew davies at July 31, 2008 10:59 PMWhat a brill web site. After days of worrying your answers solved my problem in minutes.
Posted by: David Clark at August 11, 2008 7:39 AMThanks! This help tool came in VERY handy!
Posted by: Bill at September 30, 2008 12:27 PMThis is just what I needed to know. Thank you.
Posted by: Sheri Zampelli at October 7, 2008 8:58 AMI found this article ages ago and it was very useful at the time but I never commented. I've searched for the page again because I had a friend with the same issue I had originally and this page easily explained how to change the drive letter with screen shots etc which is really helpful.
Originally I'd been trying to access some files on my USB memory stick and it wouldn't show up in "my computer" so I searched for why this would happen and because I already had a mapped network drive with the same letter I now know that it will only recognise one drive with that letter at a time... the page in question (no idea what page it was specifically) said change the drive letter assigned to it but didn't tell me how. This page did :o)
Posted by: Eddi Lowe at November 27, 2008 7:17 AMHi.. I want to install Windows XP on my 80GB external HardDisk..Pls suggest me proper steps for same..also I came to know that even if I do it, the OS when booted frm HDD will be very slow..as it will use processor from PC!! Is it the case ??
Posted by: Rajesh at December 3, 2008 9:25 PMhi leo, i have recently been attacted by a worm called 'silly dc'it changes the drive paths of the c and d drives i think i have cleaned it all up, but i am still getting a reference to ' resycled\boot' as the path for the c and d drive how do i change that??? thanks in advance
Posted by: alex at December 24, 2008 9:55 PMAlex
ps im using xp pro with service pack 1
Your directions to change drive letters is very easy to carry out. I have a problem because my
Posted by: Brian Clark at January 11, 2009 2:06 PMD: drive is shown as (Z)(D) I would like to get rid of the (Z). I am not sure wether to follow what you say or wether I would have problems
I have sbsribed to your site and am waiting for the email Thanks for a very good site...Brian
Does not work in my case. I have G: drive and want to change it to D:, it does change my letter but after the boot the paths are the same linked to G so all my programs installed on G: are unaccesible.
Posted by: user at January 27, 2009 3:37 AM