How to Change a Drive Letter

The letters assigned to your hard drives, optical drives, and USB drives in Windows are not fixed. Use the Disk Management tool in Windows to change drive letters. These steps apply to Windows XP and newer versions of Windows.

How to Change Drive Letters in Windows

Follow these steps to change the driver letters in any version of Windows.

1. Open Disk Management, the tool in Windows that lets you manage drive letters, among [many] other things.

   In Windows 11/10/8, Disk Management is also available from the Power User Menu (WIN+X keyboard shortcut) and is probably the quickest way to open it. You can also start Disk Management from the Command Prompt in any version of Windows, but starting it via Computer Management is probably best for most of you.

2. Locate from the list at the top, or from the map at the bottom, the drive you want to change the drive letter of.

   If you're not sure that the drive you're looking at is really the one you want to change the drive letter for, you can right-click or tap-and-hold the drive and then choose Explore. If you need to, look through the folders to see if that's the right drive.

3. Right-click or tap-and-hold the drive and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.

4. Select Change.

   If you've selected the primary drive by accident, some versions of Windows will display a message that reads Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your system volume or boot volume.

5. Choose the drive letter you want Windows to assign to this storage device by selecting it from the Assign the following drive letter drop-down box.

   You don't need to worry if the drive letter is already being used by another drive because Windows hides any letters you can't use.

6. Select OK.

7. Choose Yes to the Some programs that rely on drive letters might not run correctly. Do you want to continue? question.

   If you have software installed to this drive, it might stop working properly after changing the drive letter. See details on this in the section below.

8. Once the drive letter change is complete, which usually only takes a second or two, you're welcome to close any open Disk Management or other windows.

If You Have Programs Not on the Main Drive

Changing drive letter assignments for drives that have software installed to them may cause the software to stop working. This isn't quite as common with newer programs and apps but if you have an old program, especially if you're still using Windows XP or Windows Vista, this is likely to be a problem.

Fortunately, most of us don't have software installed to drives other than the primary drive (typically the C drive), but if you do, consider this your warning that you might need to reinstall the software after changing the drive letter.

No Changes for the Operating System Drive

You cannot change the drive letter of the drive that the Windows operating system is installed on. If you'd like Windows to exist on a drive other than C, or whatever it happens to be now, you can make that happen but you'll have to complete a clean install of Windows to do it. Unless you have a pressing need to have Windows exist on a different drive letter, we don't recommend going through all that trouble.

Change, Don't Switch

There's no built-in way to switch drive letters between two drives in Windows. Instead, use a drive letter that you don't plan on using as a temporary "holding" letter during the drive letter change process.

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.

Using the Command Prompt

You can also change the drive letter from Command Prompt. 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.