This will show you to change the drive letter associated with a particular drive. Sometimes it's just cool to have an (X:) drive, or an (S:) drive.

Steps

  1. 1
    Right click "My Computer".
  2. 2
    Drag down to "Manage" and click "Manage".
    Advertisement
  3. 3
    In the "Computer Management" sidebar click "Disk Management".
  4. 4
    Right click on the drive letter you want to change.
  5. 5
    Drag down to "Change Drive Letter and Paths..." click "Change Drive Letter and Paths...".
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
    A warning will pop up reminding you that changing the drive letter can cause your programs to fail. If you are confident that you want to still want to change the letter, click "Yes".
  9. 9
    If you have a program using the drive you want to change, you will get an additional warning. Unless you really know for certain what you are doing, select "No" and find the open program.
    Advertisement

Community Q&A

  • Question
    Why can I not use A: and B: letter for CD driver or any virtual?
    Community Answer
    Community Answer
    Because A: is used for floppy discs (still used today) and B: is mostly for RAM cache.

Warnings

  • Programs can become confused if a drive letter it needs to function becomes unavailable.
  • Never change your main drive letter.
  • Note: Correction. While it is VERY highly discouraged, it is possible to change your system/boot/main drive letter in windows XP/SP1, 2, and 3. Be advised, that in many cases it may render your system unbootable. However if you absolutely must change it in order for your system to function correctly, you can visit the Microsoft support article Article ID: 223188. Please do this at your own risk.
  • If settings won't stay mapped after rebooting it is possible to write a manual remapping batch file using DISKPART.
  • This method will not work if you wish to change your main drive letter. Windows XP S2 will not let you.
Advertisement

About This Article

Tested by:
wikiHow Technology Team
wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 17 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has been viewed 151,074 times.
How helpful is this?
Co-authors: 17
Updated: April 8, 2021
Views: 151,074
Categories: XP Instructions
Advertisement