How to Change Drive Letter on Windows 10/8/7 without Effort?

Why do you want to change drive letter?

The drive letter of system partition is normally assigned by Windows at installation usually the system drive letter is C. After installation, Windows still assign a drive letter for any of your partitions on hard drive, flash drive, optical drive, USB drive, card reader.

Sometimes, the drive letter will be unavailable owing to some operations and all partitions are shown as Document, Game, Music. Thus, you need to give the partitions a drive letter. Or you just want to change the original drive letter to another one.

Matters need attention to change drive letter

1. The hard drive contains your operating system and boot files will be set as C: drive and all your software will be saved on it by default. Don't try to change it, or you cannot boot your computer.

2. Sometimes, you may find that your computer skip one drive letter and assign another available drive letter for your card reader. Maybe, your card reader with one more slots, so it will have different drive letters.

3. A: drive letter or B: have historically been reserved for floppy drives.

4. If you change the drive letter of a partition or disk with software, it may stop working. You cannot find the path of it. Fortunately, this is not a common question with newer programs and apps. But if you have an old program or you still use the old operating system Windows XP or Windows Vista, this may be a potential problem.

5. The different removable drives will have a different hard drive letter.

How to assign a drive letter on Windows 10/8/7 with Disk Management?

When you encounter partition or disk problems, Windows built-in tool, such as disk management, diskpart will your first choice. Below, I will show you how to assign a drive letter on Windows 10/8/7 with Disk Management.

Step 1. Press “Win + R” to open the “Run” window and type diskmgmt.msc in the box

Step 2. Right-click the drive you want to change, and select change Drive Letter and Paths in the pop-up window.

Step 3. Click Change to summon the next window.

Notice: If you want to remove the drive letter of your partition, you can select "Remove" and follow the instructions step by step.

Step 4. Select a drive letter from the drop-down list and clickOK. And you are only allowed to use a drive letter which is still available.

Step 5. Confirm the pending operation and click Yes.

You can change drive letter in disk management. However, it may not work well at any time. For example: when you connect a hard drive to another PC, the disk may not display its drive letter and you cannot add a drive letter to it using Disk Management.

How to change drive letter on Windows 11/10/8/7 effortlessly?

Windows built-in tool can help you change drive letters in Windows. But, it's not perfect.

Want to an easier way or more advanced features, you can use free AOMEI Partition Assistant. It contains all the basic features, including Create Partition, Delete Partition, Shrink Partition, etc. Besides, It will offer you more advanced functions like Move Partition, Merge Partition, Convert to Primary Partition, Windows to go creator, etc

Now, coming to our point: how to change drive letter

Step 1. Download AOMEI Partition Assistant, install and launch it.

Step 2. Right-click the partition, then select Advanced > Change Drive Letter on the main page.

Step 3. Specify a new drive letter and click OK

Step 4. Preview the final result and click Apply to execute the further operation

Step 5. Confirm the following operations and click Proceed.

This article is also applied to change drive letter on Windows XP, external hard drive, card reader, etc.

Summary

Windows built-in tool disk management can help you change drive letter in Windows 10/8/7. But it does not work well all the time. A third-party tool like AOMEI Partition Assistant can be a better choice.

With AOMEI Partition Assistant, All the operation becomes very easy, even for a beginner. Besides, it has more advanced features., including Move Partition, Resize Parttion, Convert GPT to MBR for Windows 11 upgarde, etc. What's more, it can help you fix problems caused by Disk Management or Diskpart, including The volume size is too big, Mark partition as active greyed out, The extend volume is disabled, etc.