Have you ever had a situation when you plugged in your USB drive and it didn’t appear in the My Computer area along with other drives. One of the reasons behind this problem could be the drive letter.
In fact, Windows assigns letters to the drive when you plug it in to your computer. It is possible that Windows is trying to assign the already assigned character to some other device and thus causing the new drive to not show up.
The best solution to this problem is to change the drive letter manually. Before assigning a drive letter, you need to know this – you cannot change the drive letter of the system drive or the boot drive. So if Windows is installed in the C drive then you cannot change the C drive letter to a different one.
Additionally, because many MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows-based programs depend on drive letters, changing the drive letter may result in certain programs not working. So be a little cautious here.
Here is the step-by-step procedure for changing the drive letter of an external USB drive (same procedure for changing the drive letter of any drive or partition).
1. Click the “Start” button. Type computer in the search box. Click “Computer Management” as your search result.
2. The Computer Management window will open. In the left pane, click “Disk Management”. It will show you all the drives on your computer, including external drives (connected to the computer). In my case it was showing a Kingston USB drive and a letter (G) was assigned to it.
3. You can change the drive letter of any partition or USB stick by right-clicking on the partition and selecting “Change drive letter and path” from the context menu.
4. Click the “Change” button.
5. Now click on the drop-down menu as shown in the image below. You can assign any given letter. Notice that the letter “C, D, E” is missing from the drop-down menu. This is because these letters have been assigned to other partitions and drives.
6. Now when you assign any other letter to the drive, a message will pop up stating that some programs based on the drive letter may be running incorrectly. Click “Yes” to continue.
That’s it. We’re done.
You can also use the disk management console to perform some important operations like creating more partitions, formatting disks, etc.
Have you ever changed your drive letter to solve your USB drive problems? Share your experience in the comments.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
