How to assign a different drive letter? How to change the drive letter in Windows How to assign a new drive letter to a partition.

How to assign a letter to a hard drive?

Master's answer:

To change the letter designation hard drive In Windows operating systems, use the Disk Management snap-in. It is allowed to use 26 letters of the Latin alphabet: from A to Z. The letters A and B indicate removable disks, and all the rest can be used for disk names.

Log in as a computer administrator. Call up the main Start menu and select Control Panel to begin changing the drive letter. Select "Performance and Maintenance" and go to "Administration".

Double-click “Computer Management” and select the “Disk Management” section, which is located in the left panel of the window. Select the drive you want to rename. Click right click mouse on the field of this disk to call the service menu.

Then you should select the “Change drive letter or drive path” command and click on the “Add” button to assign a specific drive letter. You must specify the item “Assign a drive letter (A-Z)” and select a letter from the proposed list. To confirm your choice, click OK.

Apply the “Change drive letter or drive path” command, then you need to click on “Change” to make it possible to edit the letter. Select “Assign a drive letter (A-Z)” and enter the desired letter from the list that appears. Confirm the change by clicking the "OK" button.

After that, using the “Change drive letter or drive path” command, simply click on the “Delete” button. Confirm the action by clicking on the “Yes” button. And in a situation where an error message appears and it is impossible to change the drive letter, click “No”. Then close all programs that use data on this volume. Try replacing the letter again using the method described above.

If this does not help, then select “No” again and delete the drive letter using the method described above. Click on the "Yes" button and the letter will be deleted after the system reboots.

Change drive letter or several disks into which the hard drive of your laptop or computer is divided is not difficult in the Windows 7 operating system. The reasons for this can be completely different. For example, you want local disks to have a letter with which its name begins - if the disk is called “Music” or “Music”, then its letter will be “M”. Or you need to swap the disks for ease of use and quick access to them.

For example, I had a case when, after installing a second hard drive and dividing it into local disks, the following sequence of disks was formed: C, D, E (local disks of the old hard drive), F (DVD drive), G (virtual drive), H, I (local disks of the new hard drive). The sequence of disks in a Windows system is determined by the serial number of the letter of the Latin alphabet that is assigned to each disk. It was very inconvenient for me (I use the utility for work Total Commander) work with such a sequence of disks that first there are local disks, then floppy disks, then local disks again. I like to keep everything organized, so I had to rename my drives so that I would see local drives first, then floppy and virtual drives.

In general, the reasons why you will need , there may be a great many. I’ll just tell you in as much detail and clearly as possible how to change the drive letter using standard Windows tools.

How to change drive letter in Windows 7

To change the local drive letter, some steps must be performed. setting Windows systems 7 . So, first you need to open the “Computer Management” window. Right-click on the “Computer” icon (it can be located on the desktop if you moved it there, using the hint from the article “How to add a “Computer” icon to the desktop Windows table 7" or in the "Start" menu) and from the drop-down list of items context menu select "Manage".

The “Computer Management” window should appear in front of you, where you have access to utilities, storage devices, services and applications. But we are interested in the “Disk Management” item from the “Storage Devices” category. We select it by clicking on it with the left mouse button once.


As soon as you do this, a window will appear in front of you in which you can change drive letter in Windows 7. My computer has two hard drives, one of which is divided into three local disks, one optical drive and one virtual drive.


All that remains is to carry out the simplest manipulations with the local disks into which your hard drive or hard drives are divided, if your computer has several hard drives installed, as in my case. Right-click on the drive whose letter you want to change, and from the drop-down list text menu stop your choice on the item " ».

You will see a small window called " Changing the drive letter or paths for" In my case, the local disk was initially assigned the letter “E”. Let's replace it, say, with the letter "M". To do this, click on the “Change” button located in the center.


Another small window will open “ ", in which you need to click on the button with the original letter of the local drive and select the desired one from the drop-down list of letters available for replacement. In my case it is the letter "M".

To confirm changing the drive letter from “E” to “M”, click “OK”.


Immediately after clicking, a warning will appear stating that some programs that use this letter will stop working. In my case, this is excluded, because on drive “E” I store personal data: photos, music, lessons, and so on. Therefore, I boldly confirm the change of drive letter by clicking the "OK" button.


That's it, we succeeded change drive letter in Windows 7.


Using the same principle, you can change the letter of not only local, but floppy and virtual disks. Modify operating system experiment, configure, optimize in the way that is most convenient for you. There is always a place for questions in the form of comments to the article. Be on friendly terms with your computer!

I encountered the following problem: when connecting any removable external hard USB disk / Windows flash drives does not assign a drive letter to it. When you connect a disk, a message appears about installing a new device, the disk appears in Device Manager, but is not displayed in Explorer.

In order for a disk to become available on the system, it must be manually assigned a drive letter each time through the Disk Management console. To do this you need to open the console Computer management(via the Win+X menu) and go to the section Storage devices -> Disk Management. In the list of drives, find the connected removable USB device. As you can see, the disk is working fine, there is only one partition created on it with a file NTFS system, but it doesn't have a drive letter assigned to it. To assign a letter to it, right-click on the section and select the menu item " Change drive letter or drive path».

In the window that appears, click the button " Add", select "" and in the drop-down list select the letter that you want to assign to the drive (for example, F:) and click OK.

After this, the connected USB drive appears in Explorer with the drive letter assigned to it. However, after disconnecting USB devices or rebooting the computer, it is again not assigned a drive letter. You have to again assign a letter manually through disk management - which is somewhat annoying.

Advice. Make sure that Windows detects the partition(s) on the connected drive and that the partition is formatted with the NTFS/FAT32/ file system. If , or the disk is unpartitioned, most likely the USB disk is just new or the partition table is damaged and you will have to restore the file system first.

It seems like some kind of automatic partition detection function on external hard drives is not working.

How can you solve the problem?

First of all, check if the service is running Virtual Disk(the service is called Virtual disk ). You can check the status of a service through the service management console ( services.msc).

or from the command line:

SC query vds

SERVICE_NAME: vds
TYPE: 10 WIN32_OWN_PROCESS
STATE: 1 STOPPED
WIN32_EXIT_CODE: 0 (0x0)
SERVICE_EXIT_CODE: 0 (0x0)
CHECKPOINT: 0x0
WAIT_HINT: 0x0

If the service is stopped, start it from the graphical snap-in (Start button) or like this:

Net start vds

Advice. In some cases, for the Virtual Disk service to work correctly, you have to change its startup type to Automatic (see).

Check if the problem is still there. If enabling the service Virtual disk it didn’t help, let’s check if the automatic mounting of new volumes function is enabled.

Note. When automount is enabled, Windows automatically mounts file systems new disks connected to the system and itself assigns drive letters to partitions. If automount is disabled, Windows detects new disks but does not produce them automatic installation and does not assign drive letters to new volumes.

Open a command prompt window (with administrator rights) and run the commands:

Diskpart

Within diskpart, let's check whether automatic mounting is enabled for new volumes:

DISKPART>automount

Automatic mounting of new volumes disabled.
As we can see, automounting is disabled. Let's turn it on

DISKPART>automount enable

Automatic mounting of new volumes enabled.
Automatic mounting of new volumes is enabled.

Let's finish working with diskpart

DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

Note. By the way, the automount function is also responsible for ensuring that the system remembers the drive letter assigned to the drive. Thanks to this, the next USB connection disk partitions into external drive the same letters will be assigned as during its previous connection (of course, if these letters are not occupied). To clear saved associations, you need to use the command automountscrub.

Restart your computer and check if letters are assigned to external drives.

Check if the partition is set to USB disk attributes are hidden and "will not assign a drive letter". IN command line Diskpart run:

After this, this partition on the flash drive should be automatically assigned a drive letter on any computer.

Also keep in mind that if USB flash drive If there are multiple partitions, Windows will only see the first partition. The ability to create appeared only in Windows 10 1703 (before that, in order for the second and subsequent partitions on flash drives to be accessible in Windows, you had to use a trick that forced ).

If your flash drive does not appear in the Disk Management console, try using a different one USB port, cable. Try connecting the flash drive directly to the computer (without a USB hub), check whether the power is turned on, and whether it is detected on other computers.

Greetings, dear guests!

In this article you will learn how to change drive letter in Windows 10, be it additional section with an archive of films/programs, for example, either a flash drive or a removable hard drive. Only for system partition(drive C, as a rule) you will not be able to change the letter. The instructions are written for Windows 10, but you can also use it for previous versions OS.

Let's get straight to the point. Right-click the Start menu and select Disk Management.

Three more options to go to Disk Management, for those who are not looking for easy ways and want to know everything:

So, a window with a list of disks opened. If you are logged in through Computer Management, select the item on the left Disk Management in the Storage devices section.

Right-click on the drive you want to change letter to. Select menu item Change drive letter or drive path...

In the next window, select your disk in the list and click Change.

Next, a new window will pop up in which the item is already highlighted Assign a drive letter (A-Z). To the right of it, select the desired letter in the drop-down menu. Only free letters that are not already occupied by other drives are displayed.

After clicking OK, you will see this warning, indicating that some programs that use this drive letter may stop working. If you installed any programs or games on a separate partition, then I do not recommend changing the letter of such a drive, otherwise you will have problems launching these games/programs later.

In general, agree to continue, click OK.

That's it, the drive letter has now been replaced with a new one.

P.S.: Some shortcuts may stop working for you if they referred to this disk or a file from this disk. Therefore, check the functionality of such shortcuts.

Still have questions about replacing drive letters? Ask, I will answer.

After Windows installations All sections are automatically assigned titles. By default, the system one is assigned the letter C, and the rest are assigned further in the alphabet: D, E, etc. If you connect a flash drive, it will be assigned to the next one in the order of priority. For example, F. We connected an external hard drive - it will be called G.

What to do if you don't like the standard name? You can rename the drive letter to whatever you like. There are 26 of them in total: from A to Z.

The first two - A and B - are already occupied. They are "reserved" for floppy drives. Although if you don’t have them (they haven’t been installed on modern PCs and laptops for a long time), then you can easily assign one of these letters to the local partition.

This is done in literally 5 minutes. Or faster. Moreover, its change in different Windows versions performs almost identically. Plus there is universal methods, which work for Windows 10, 8.1, 7 and even XP. Step by step instructions See below for information on how to change the drive letter. This is done very simply, and now you will see for yourself.

How to change the drive letter in Windows 7?

Let's start with the good old "seven".

1. Go to Start – Control Panel – Administrative Tools.
2. Find the Computer Management shortcut and launch it.
3. A new window will open - in the left column, click on “Disk Management”.

The first stage is completed. It will be displayed in front of you working window, where the drive letter is changed. All available partitions are displayed here (there are 3 of them in the screenshot), plus connected flash drives and external HDD hard drives (if any).

Select any of them, right-click and click on the line “Change drive letter or path”.

A small window will open - click on the “Change” button.

As you can see, there is nothing complicated here. Just a couple of mouse clicks, a few minutes - and you're done. Let's move on.

Assigning a letter to a section in the figure eight is also very simple

And much faster than in the previous version.

1. Open Start.
2. Write diskmgmt.msc in the search field.
3. Press Enter.

Or click Win+R and copy this command to Open.

After this, the required window will immediately appear where you can reassign the drive letter. Then everything is done in the same way: select the desired local partition and rename it.

How to change drive letter in Windows 10?

Tens users shouldn’t have any difficulties either. After all, changing the drive letter in Windows 10 is very easy. All you need to do is right-click on the “Start” button and select “Manage” from the menu.

After this, a familiar window will open where you can assign a letter to your hard drive or flash drive. This is done exactly the same as in Windows 7 or 8.

What to do if after a while you no longer like the new name? How to return the drive letter? Open this window again and restore the previous name.

Finally, I will note a few nuances that you need to know:

1. The first two methods are universal. They work for all OS: Windows 7, 8, 10 and even XP. So if you need to change the drive letter in Windows XP, choose one of the first two options.
2. After renaming the partition, a warning message will appear indicating that some programs may no longer run. That is why it is strictly not recommended to touch the local drive C at all.
3. After assigning a new letter, shortcuts that referenced that local section may not work correctly. Therefore, be sure to check their performance. And if something happens, create new shortcuts.

As a rule, the need to change the partition name appears only in one case - when you use an external HDD drive that is permanently connected to a computer or laptop. If you don't like the given name, you can change it. Similar steps can be done for a flash drive, but it is usually used only temporarily.

However, there is another situation when a name is not assigned to a new device. This usually applies to the same external HDD drives. In this case, you need to manually set the drive letter using the method described above.