Where to change the hard drive letter. How to change the letter of a drive or flash drive

You may need to change the name of one of your drives for various reasons: for aesthetic reasons, or if one of the programs requires a specific installation path. It may also happen that you reinstalled the system, and the drive letters changed by themselves. Then the programs will not run, because they “remember” the previous address of their files. In total, you can choose among twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet: from A to Z. At the same time, the letters from C to Z are reserved for the hard drive, and the first three remain for disk drives and floppy disks. If your computer or laptop does not have an optical drive, then you can take the characters reserved for it. Change the letters of the hard drive using the example of this article.

First, you need to open a special built-in disk management utility. One way to open it is to call the execution line. Simultaneously hold down the "Win" and "R" keys on the keyboard. In the search window that appears, type the following command “diskmgmt.msc”. Click "OK" to start searching.

The utility will open in a few seconds.

If in the process you have any problems and the program does not open, then refer to the second method, which will solve the problem.
Open the "Start" in the explorer and refer to the search bar in it.

Start typing "disk management" in it. The search will automatically start in the upper area. As soon as you see the line “Create and format hard disk partitions”, stop typing and open the program. On Windows 10, the required line may simply be called “Disk Management”.

As soon as the utility starts, select the required disk by simply placing the mouse cursor on it. In this example, there is only one drive on the computer with the letter C.

Right-click, in the drop-down list, select "Change drive letter or drive path ..."

A small window will open in front of you, in which you need to click the “Change” button.

Select any letter of the Latin alphabet in the area on the right. Remember that the characters C - Z are reserved by local drives.

Once you've made your choice, click "ok" at the bottom of the window.

Now you know how quickly you can change the letter of your drive on a computer or laptop. Keep in mind one important nuance: after this procedure, all your programs, most likely, will not start at all. The fact is that in the executable file of a particular program, the address to all the files that need to be accessed in the process of work is registered. Thus, it is better to change the drive letter immediately after formatting the system, or when you already have very little software installed that can be easily replaced.

The Windows operating system always assigns a drive letter to all drives. Whether it's a floppy drive, DVD drive, flash drive, camera SD card, hard drive, and so on. But it is not always convenient for us how Windows assigns them.

Very often there is a situation when after the system drive "C" there is a second hard drive, or partition, with the letter "E". A DVD drive with the letter "D". And "I want it in order." In this article, we will consider the question - how to change the drive letter of Windows 7.

This operation is very simple and fast, and does not require you to go deep into the system. The only remark is that you cannot change the letter of the system partition "C".

To work with disks in Windows, there is a special program - "Disk Management".
You can launch it in several ways. I will consider only 2 of them.

1) Click the "Start" menu - right-click on "Computer" - select "Manage"

2) Select "Disk Management"

Method number 2

1) "Start" - "All Programs" - "Accessories" - "Run". The "Run" window will open, where we enter the command "diskmgmt.msc" and click "OK"

2) We open almost the same window as in the first case

How to change the drive letter of Windows 7

To change the drive letter of Windows 7, right-click on the desired drive and select "Change drive letter or drive path ..."

In the window that appears, click on "Change" and select the drive letter.

We agree with the warning that appears and restart the computer.

After that - the drive letter of Windows 7 is changed.

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This article will talk in detail about how to change the drive letter in different versions of Windows operating systems. XP, 7 and 8 will be considered. In principle, all 3 cases are somewhat similar to each other. However, there are still small differences.

Windows XP

Let's talk about Windows XP first. The first thing to do is to log in with an account that has administrator rights. Next, go to the "Start" menu, select "Control Panel" there.

Then click on "Performance and Maintenance".

A window will appear in which we click on "Administrative Tools", after which we need to double-click on the line "Computer Management".

On the left side of the screen, you will see a kind of panel with a number of available functions. There you need to select the item we need, namely “Disk Management”.

This completes our journey to the location in Windows XP where you can change the drive letter. It remains only to select the drive you need, right-click on it and select the line called "Change drive letter or drive path" in the drop-down menu.

To specify your letter, click Change.

As a result, the user is offered a choice of all the letters of the Latin alphabet from A to Z. Select the desired letter and click "OK".

A confirmation window opens again in front of us, in which you just need to click on the "Yes" button.

Ready! Congratulations, you have changed the local drive letter in Windows XP.

Windows 7

However, not all modern users currently have a computer equipped with the Windows XP operating system. Many have switched to the Windows 7 generation, so it would be advisable to write detailed instructions for changing the drive letter for this system as well.

In principle, the process is practically no different from XP, with the exception of some changes in the path of opening the final menu that displays local drives. And yet, how to change the drive letter of Windows 7? Let's take a closer look.

First, you need to open the well-known Start menu - in the lower left corner of the screen and select the Control Panel item.

Now click "Administration".

Then you should double-click on the line "Computer Management". There is an important point here. If the administrator account has a password, you will be prompted to enter it, otherwise you will not be able to proceed with this operation. This is done so that an ordinary user cannot make any changes without the supervision of an administrator.

After all the above operations, a window appears in front of you, in which you will need to select the item: "Disk Management".

Next, a list of all disks appears. From this point on, the process is no different from Windows XP. We right-click on the local disk of interest to us and in the drop-down window select the line: "Change drive letter or drive path." Click the "Change" button.

Choose the appropriate letter from A to Z, and click OK.

A message will appear to remind you that the programs that are on this drive may stop working. We press "Yes".

Congratulations, you have successfully changed the hard drive letter in Windows 7.

Windows 8

Technological progress continues to move steadily forward with huge strides. Hundreds of new gadgets, games and programs appear every year. Microsoft Corporation is also keeping up with the global trend of the 21st century, and not so long ago, a completely new operating system called Windows 8 was released. Many people around the world are gradually moving to this system. What should they do in a situation where they urgently need to change the letter of the local drive? After all, despite the fact that Windows 8 is just a slightly improved version of Windows 7, it no longer has the familiar Start menu. Although it can be returned, I will talk about this in detail in another article.

To change the letter in Windows 8 you need to be logged in as an administrator.

Windows 8 has two interfaces - tiled and standard desktop. Our task is to launch the control panel, after which we need to repeat the steps as in the situation with Windows 7. In the tiled interface, it is enough to start typing the phrase on the keyboard: “Control Panel”. As soon as you start typing text, the system will automatically search for applications and it will appear in front of you in the first place.

Changing the drive letter is a procedure performed to run a program that has absolute paths in initialization files, or to arrange hard drive partitions in a certain way. Therefore, you need to know how to change the drive letter in Windows 10.

Renaming a section

The letter C is intended for the name of the system partition (this has been the case since the very advent of Windows). The remaining sections are named in alphabetical order from D to Z.

Healthy! The letters A and B are used to name floppy drives. If these devices are not present on the PC, use these letters as well.

To change a letter, follow these steps.

1. Start Menu → Control Panel → Administrative Tools → Computer Management → Disk Management.
   An alternative way to run the utility is in the Run window, enter the command: diskmgmt.msc.
2. Select the desired partition → RMB → Change drive letter or drive path... → Change.
3. Set the switch to "Assign a drive letter (A-Z)" → select the desired letter in the drop-down list → confirm the actions after the warning appears.
   

Important! If you rename the partition where the programs are installed, most likely they will not be able to start.

In the case of a flash drive, repeat the same steps as when renaming the hard drive partitions.

Video

The video will allow you to visually see how to change the drive letter.

Letter assignment

You need to assign a drive letter if for some reason it “flew off”, as a result of which this partition of the hard drive ceased to be displayed when entering My Computer.

How to hide a section

1. Run: In the Run window, type command → regedit.
2. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE → Software → Microsoft → Windows → CurrentVersion → Policies.
3. Menu Edit → New → a section called "Explorer".
   
4. In the "Explorer" setting, create a "DWORD (32-bit) Value" named "NoDrives".
   
5. Open "NoDrives" → set the switch to "Decimal" and set the value corresponding to the letter of the section you want to hide. You can find out the numerical value corresponding to each disk in the table:

   A	1	I	256	Q	65536	Y	16777216
   B	2	J	512	R	131072	Z	33554432
   C	4	K	1024	S	262144	hide all sections	67108863
   D	8	L	2048	T	524288	display all sections	0
   E	16	M	4096	U	1048576
   F	32	N	8192	V	2097152
   G	64	O	16384	W	4194304
   H	128	P	32768	X	8388608

   Healthy! To hide multiple sections (two or more), specify the sum of their numeric values ​​in the field.

6. Restart your computer.

Conclusion

When renaming hard drive partitions, programs installed on them may stop working. Therefore, you should only perform such actions as a last resort or if the applications require it. The renaming algorithm for HDD, SSD (you can read about how to configure Windows 10 to work on an SSD in the article "") and a removable flash drive is the same.

In this article I will describe step by step how to change drive letter in windows xp, windows 7, windows 8. This does not require any additional utilities and programs, everything is done by standard Windows tools. In this example, I will change the drive letter from "G" to "D" (the drive can be renamed to any free letter).

Attention: You cannot change the drive letter where the Windows operating system is installed. It is usually installed on the drive letter "C".

On label My Computer/ Computer/ This Computer (depending on the installed operating system Windows XP/Windows 7/Windows 8) right-click and select " Control". The "Computer Management" window will open. If for some reason this method is not suitable, the "Computer Management" window can be opened in another way, click "Start" - "Control Panel" - "Administrative Tools" - "Computer Management" (in the version Windows 8, you need to right-click in the lower left corner and select "Control Panel" - "Administrative Tools" - "Computer Management", in Windows 8.1 version, right-click on the "Start" button and select "Control Panel" - "Administrative Tools" - "Computer Management").

In the "Computer Management" window, click "Disk Management", select the drive you want to change the name of, right-click on it and select "Change drive letter or drive path..."

In the window that opens, select the disk and click the "Change" button.

Select an available drive letter.

After that, you will see another message stating that when changing the letter, some applications will not be available, click "Yes".