Changing Drive Letters

During the process of setting up my pc, I attached my external hard drive. It was automatically found and assigned drive letter E. All is well with the world. Since the external is used for my backups, I set my backup software to copy various sections of my hard drive and my entire drive on my preferred schedule. I backup a lot of data, program configuration files, and pretty much anything that will save me from a nightmare if I lost my pc to some catastrophic failure. All runs smoothly for a month or so.

However, the other day I booted my pc and attached my external hard drive and my backup failed. Why? For some reason Windows decided to assign it to drive letter F. Huh? What’s up with that? I disconnected the drive and reconnected it, drive F. I disconnected the drive, shutdown, rebooted, and reconnected it, drive F. I shutdown, rebooted, left the drive connected, drive F. Huh? Since when? I went searching…

I found that I could assign the external to a drive letter of my choice by doing the following:

Click start on your taskbar, then click run and type diskmgmt.msc and click ok.

The Disk Management utility will load and you can now right click on the drive letter you want to change, and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.

I made my change and my external was once again drive E. However, I was worried about what would happen when I rebooted so I ran a little test. I disconnected the external, shutdown, rebooted, and reconnected it, drive E. All is well with the world once again.

Of course, be very careful when changing drive letters. Make sure you’re not changing your boot drive (usually C:) or any other drive used to run software on your pc. If you’re not sure about what you’re changing, then don’t change it!