Change drive letters on XP

October 6, 2008 4:14 AM

I need to change nearly all the drive letters on XP, including the system partition. How do I do this?

I have two hard drives, both split into two partitions. I recently reinstalled Windows, and my drive letters are all changed round! The partition which I store my documents on is now C:, while my system partition is K:.

I found this, but I've heard that it can seriously mess up your computer. How do I change the letters around?

posted by edbyford to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Right Click on My Computer, select Manage

In the MSC, pick the Logical Disc Manager service

You can right click on each drive it shows you there and change drive letters. Drive letters which are currently assigned and in use will not be available to you, so you may need to do some removal of drive letters and rebooting before the full assignment.

Reassigning the system drive letter is harder though, as, while you can do it from within the MSC, any registry entries which relate to it won't be updated.
posted by benzo8 at 4:26 AM on October 6

You can't reassign your system partition, AFAIK. Too many files refer to the drive letter and there's really no way you can change them all without breaking something.
posted by dunkadunc at 4:57 AM on October 6

Norton PartitionMagic DriveMapper will do this for you. The program moves through registry and other settings, finding and replacing paths and other calls to drive letters. It isn't free though. I also have never tried to use it on the boot drive. Best bet is to reinstall, unfortunately, or live with the mess.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:59 AM on October 6

Ouch - been there, done that.

If this is a clean install, I would just reformat and reinstall windows, making sure that the drive letters are right, especially where the system partition is involved. It'll probably take less time than fiddling around in an attempt to reassign C:.
posted by sary at 12:11 PM on October 6

Do you have multiple physical disks? Or are you trying to change the drive letters just on the one disk? If you are using multiple disks, you can try to unplug the slave drive and reassign without that drive taking letters that you need.

I run into this issue when I reformat, but I simply unplug my internal memory card reader and 2nd/3rd hard drives so they do not take up drive letters that I want my main disk to occupy.

Benzo8 is right, Right click My Computer>Manage>Computer Management>Storage>Disc Management. Then from there you will be able to reassign disk drives, and secondary partitions that are not the System Volume/Boot Volume.

Try to reformat and just unplug any unneeded drives.
posted by dpollitt at 2:50 PM on October 6

How to restore the system/boot drive letter in Windows

The procedure in this Microsoft KB article has worked for me in the past. As always, be careful changing registry settings, your mileage may vary.
posted by miks2u at 2:58 PM on October 6

Thanks for all your help. I might try Norton, but if that doesn't work, then how would I change the drive letters when reinstalling Windows? When I was installing Windows, the 'my documents' partition already had the C: drive letter assigned to it (in the screen where you choose on which partition to install Windows).

How would I change that around?
posted by edbyford at 3:15 AM on October 7

The easiest way to force Windows to install on the drive you want is to actually unplug/remove all the other drives from the PC before you install - even the internal ones. Don't give it any choices! Then you can install Windows, switch off reconnect all the other drives again and use the Logical Drive Manager (as described above) to reletter the other drives once Windows has discovered them.
posted by benzo8 at 7:37 AM on October 7

What about if I have multiple partitions on one drive?
posted by edbyford at 8:20 AM on October 7