For example, let's say you'd like to swap Drive A for Drive B. Start by changing Drive A's letter to one that you don't plan on using (like X), then Drive B's letter to Drive A's original one, and finally Drive A's letter to Drive B's original one.

Free antivirus killer for mac os 10.6.8. This is a guide on how to change the drive letter in Windows for an external USB device like a hard drive or USB stick. Here’s a common problem that I have seen: You plug in a USB flash drive into your computer and it says ready to use, but for some reason nothing shows up in the list of drives.

Take it out, plug it back in and still nothing shows up! What’s the problem? Well, it could be several things, but the most common issue is that the drive letter Windows is trying to assign to your device is already taken by another device or is mapped to a network drive.

Sadly, Windows does not always figure this out by itself (which is should) and your drive is basically lost in computer neverland. In order to fix it, we need to go to Computer Management and assign the drive letter manually. There are two ways to get to the Computer Management dialog in Windows, one through Control Panel and the second by right-clicking Computer and choosing Manage.

Right-click My Computer Computer Management in Administrative Tools Click on Disk Management under the Storage section and the right side will show you all of the current drives and partitions on your drive. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, just find the drive you are looking for in the graphs at the bottom. They are usually named Disk 0, Disk 1, CD-ROM, CD-ROM1, etc. If you’re looking for a USB flash drive, you’ll see the word “ Removable” underneath Disk X. In my case, it’s the I: drive that is removable.

However, if you have a large USB hard drive connected, then it may show up as an additional hard disk like mine shown below (H:). By default, Windows gave my portable USB drive the letter H. If your drive has no letter or you want to change it, then right-click in the white space to the right of the drive letter and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Click the Change button in the dialog box and then pick a new letter from the drop-down list. Just for your info, the Mount in the following NTFS folder option is used if you had right clicked on an external hard drive and instead of giving it a drive letter, you wanted to just have it show up as a folder on your current hard drive. That means you could create a folder in My Documents called pictures that actually points to another hard drive instead of one where all of your My Documents are currently stored. Click Ok twice and your drive should now have the new letter assigned. Usually, if the USB stick was not showing up before, once you change the letter, it will automatically pop up and ask you what you want to do. That’s about it!

You can also use Disk Management to format disks, determine the type of File System and see the amount of free space available.

Advertisement In Windows operating systems, hard drive partitions and external drives, such as optical drives and USB flash drives, are identified by drive letters from A to Z. Some of the letters are reserved, for example A and B for floppy drives or C for the active primary partition, which typically contains the operating systems. Any other partitions or optical drives are assigned subsequent letters. Removable drives receive drive letters based on availability. For example your USB flash drive could receive the drive letter G when it is plugged in alone, but it might receive the drive letter H, when your external hard drive was plugged in and grabbed the G first. As this demonstrates, drive letter assignments for removable drives are not permanent. In some cases, however, a permanent drive letter assignment is desirable.

Let’s say you have set up a backup routine. Your storage location is an external hard drive. You specified the path to this hard drive, assuming it would always be assigned the same drive letter. If however, another device is connected and occupies the respective drive letter, the backup may fail. To avoid this scenario, you can permanently assign drive letters to selected devices. DriveLetterView is a freeware utility for Windows, which provides a list of currently and previously connected devices and their respective drive letters. Moreover, you can use this tool to remove devices or change their drive letter assignment.

If desired, a list of all drive letters with assigned drives and other properties can be exported to a simple text file or saved in CSV, XML, or HTML format. DriveLetterView comes in a ZIP archive and being a portable tool it doesn’t require an installation. Simply extract the files, run the EXE file as Administrator, and you will see a list of your drives, similar to the one shown in the screenshot below. Note that if your anti-virus software reports DriveLetterView as malware, it’s a false positive! Using the red X in the top left you can delete drive letters of devices that are not currently plugged in. This way you can make drive letters available and subsequently assign them to other devices from the list.