How to Change a Drive Letter

The letters assigned to your hard drives, optical drives, and USB drives in Windows are not fixed. If you want to change a drive letter on your laptop or desktop computer, you can use Disk Management.

This system utility exists in Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Here's how to change the drive letter:

1. Open Disk Management with administrator permissions. To do so, open the Start button, and then write Disk Management.
2. In Disk Management, select and hold (or right-click) the volume for which you want to change or add a drive letter, and then select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
3. To change the drive letter, select Change. To add a drive letter if the drive doesn't already have one, select Add.
4. Select the new drive letter, select OK, and then select Yes when prompted about how programs that rely on the drive letter might not run correctly.

If you have programs Not on the C drive

Changing drive letter assignments for drives that have software installed to them may cause the software to stop working. Fortunately, most of us don't have software installed to drives other than the primary drive (typically the C drive), but if you do, you might need to reinstall the software after changing the drive letter.

Assign drive letters via Command Prompt

If you ever need to set a drive letter via Command Prompt, you can use diskpart.

It's not as easy as using Disk Management and you can't see right away which letters are available to choose, but it is completely doable with the diskpart command.

1. Open the command prompt
2. Type diskpart
3. Type list disk to see a list of disks
4. Type select disk #  (where # is the disk you want)
5. Type detail disk to see partitions
6. Type select volume #  (where # is the volume you want)
7. Type assign letter=x  (where x is the drive letter)