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In Windows XP you can use the Disk Management administrative tool snap-in to manage drive letter assignments of volumes or partitions of hard disks, CD-ROM drives and other removable media, such as pen drives and Zip drives.

Some Important Facts

You can assign 26 drive letters from A to Z. Out of these, A and B are reserved for Floppy disk drives-however, if your PC does not have a floppy drive, you can assign these letters to other volumes.

It is not possible to change the drive letter of the system or the boot volume. This means that if your Windows operating system is installed in the C drive, you will not be able to change the drive letter of this drive.

Lastly, before changing a drive letter, you must know that there are a few MS-DOS-based and Microsoft Windows-based applications that use environment and other variables that refer to specific drive letter. When you change the drive letter, these programs may not function properly until you modify their variables manually to reflect the change.

Steps to Assign, Change, and Remove a Drive Letter

Follow the steps given below to make changes to your drive letter assignments:

• Log on to the PC with a user that has administrative rights to the system.
• Open Control Panel, select the Performance and Maintenance link, select Administrative Tools, double-click on Computer Management, and then in the left pane of the Computer Management window select Disk Management.
• Right-click on the volume, logical drive, or partition that you want to modify, select Properties and then select the Change Drive Letter and Paths Command.
  
  Change Drive Letter and Paths for Drive_Letter dialog box is displayed.
• Here, to assign a new drive letter to the selected volume, select the Add button
• Select the Assign the following drive letter-usually selected by default, select a drive letter from the drop-down list or accept the default drive letter assignment and then select OK.
  
  The new drive letter is now assigned to your selected volume, logical drive, or partition and the change is reflected in the Disk Management window.
• Similarly, if your want to change the drive letter of a particular volume, logical drive, or partition, right-click on it in the Disk Management window, and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
• Now, select the Change button, select Assign the following drive letter-if it is not selected by default, select a new drive letter from the drop-down list and then select the OK button.
  
  The drive letter of your selected volume, logical drive, or partition is changed and is reflected in the Disk Management window.
• To remove the drive letter of your selected volume, logical drive, or partition, right-click on it in the Disk Management window and select the Change Drive Letter and Paths command.
• Select the Remove button and then select Yes to confirm your decision.

The drive letter of your selected volume, logical drive, or partition is removed and the change is reflected in the Disk Management window.

Troubleshooting Drive Letter Assignment Errors

You may receive the following error message, when you try to change a drive letter.

The volume volume_label drive_letter is currently in use. If you continue, the new drive letter will be assigned; but you can still use the old drive letter to access the volume until you restart your computer. The old drive letter will not be available for assignment until you restart.

Warning: Changing the drive letter of a volume could cause programs to no longer run.

Or, you may receive the following error message, when you are trying to remove a drive letter.

The volume <volume_label drive_letter> is currently in use. If you continue, the drive letter will be freed; however, it will still be available for use until you restart your computer.

Warning: Changing the drive letter of a volume could cause programs to

These errors occur if the volume, logical drive, or partition whose drive letter you are trying to change or remove have some files being used by you or other users on the network. Therefore, to resolve the issue, select No on the error message dialog box, close all programs that are using the files on this volume, logical drive, or partition and then proceed with changing or removing the drive letter from the Disk Management window.