How to Change Drive Letters in Windows
Follow these steps to change the driver letters in any version of 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. 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. 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.
