Top 5 Ways to Change a Drive Letter For Storage on Windows 11

By default, Windows assigns letters to your hard drives, optical drives, and USB drives. However, you are not bound to the default letters that Windows provides. You can always change the drive letter associated with an internal or external drive.

However, you’ll need to be careful before randomly changing drive letters. Most important is when you have installed software or games in a separate partition or drive. That can break the way these programs work. Before we show you how to change the drive letter in Windows 11, here are a few things you should know.

When You Shouldn’t Change Drive Letters on Windows

You should not change the drive letter of the drive where Windows is installed. Changing the boot drive letter can lead to some problems with the operating system. In the worst case, your computer may not boot at all.

Changing the drive letter of the drive where you installed your applications and programs can cause them to stop working. Therefore, it is best to change the drive letter before you start using the drive.

So if you don’t have any programs installed on your drive or if it’s an external drive you can change the drive letter without any problems. Let’s look at a few different ways to change the drive letter on Windows 11.

1. Change the drive letter using the Settings app

The easiest way to change the drive letter on Windows is through the Settings app. So let’s start with that.

Step 1: Press Windows key + I to launch the Settings app. In the System tab, click Storage.

Step 2: Expand Advanced Storage Settings and click Disks & Volumes.

Step 3: Open the Properties of the drive to which you want to assign the new drive letter.

Step 4: Click the Change drive letter button.

Step 5: Use the drop-down menu to select a new drive letter and click OK to save the changes.

2. Change the drive letter through the disk management application

Disk Management is a great tool for managing partitions, formatting drives, and performing other storage-related tasks in Windows. It gives you the option to change the drive letter of a drive.

Step 1: Press the Windows + R key combination to open the Run dialog box. Type diskmgmt.msc in the Open field and press Enter.

Step 2: Select Yes when the User Account Control (UAC) prompt appears.

Step 3: You will see all the drives in the bottom half of the window. Right click on your drive and select ‘Change drive letter and path.’

Step 4: Click Change and choose a new letter from the drop-down menu. Then click OK.

Step 5: Click OK when the warning message appears.

3. Change the drive letter using Command Prompt

Are you comfortable using the command prompt? Only proceed if you are, otherwise you can skip this solution. You can change the drive letter in Windows 11 by running some commands in the Command Prompt. This is the way:

Step 1: Right-click on the Start icon and select Terminal (Admin) from the list.

Step 2: Select Yes when the User Account Control (UAC) prompt appears.

Step 3: In the Command Prompt window, type the following commands and press Enter after each to see the list of drives on your PC:

disk list diskpart

Note that Volumes represent visible partitions, and they will have a drive letter assigned next to them. Record your drive number from the first column.

Step 4: Enter the following command to select your drive.

select the volume N

Replace N in the command above with the volume number noted in the previous step.

Step 5: Finally, type the following command and press Enter to assign a new drive letter:

assign letter = X

Replace ‘X’ in the above command with the letter you want to assign.

4. Change the drive letter with Windows PowerShell

Windows PowerShell is another command line tool to change the drive letter on your computer. Here are the steps you need to follow.

Step 1: Press Windows key + S to open the search menu. Type Windows PowerShell and select Run as Administrator.

Step 2: Select Yes when the User Account Control (UAC) prompt appears.

Step 3: Run the following command to see the list of disk partitions on your PC.

Get Partition

Note down the drive letter you want to change.

Step 4: Enter the following command to change the drive letter.

Get Partition -DriveLetter CurrentLetter | Set partition -NewDriveLetter NewLetter

Replace ‘CurrentLetter’ in the above command with the letter noted in the previous step. Replace ‘NewLetter’ with the letter you want to assign. Then press Enter.

PowerShell will change the drive letter and you can open File Explorer to see the new drive letter.

5. Change the drive letter from Registry Editor

Finally, you can change the drive letter in Windows using the Registry Editor. However, you should only use this method if you are comfortable editing registry files. Also, make sure you back up all registry files and create a restore point before proceeding.

Step 1: Press the Windows + R key combination to open the Run dialog box, type re-editthen press Enter.

Step 2: Select Yes when the User Account Control (UAC) prompt appears.

Step 3: Use the left pane to navigate to the following key:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

Step 4: In the MountedDevices key, find the binary value associated with your drive. For example, if you want to change the letter of the drive V:, look for the binary value ‘\DosDevices\V:’. Right click on it and select Rename.

Step 5: Change the drive letter at the end of the binary value’s name.

Exit the Registry Editor window and restart your PC for the changes to take effect.

Change drive letter on Windows

Changing the drive letter is something you probably don’t do often. But it’s great to see how Windows 11 offers several different ways to do the same thing. Let us know which method you would use in the comments section below.

Categories: How to
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