How to change the drive letter in Windows XP for an external USB stick or hard drive

Posted on July 13, 2007 at 6:54 am

This is a guide on how to change a drive letter in Windows XP for an external device. Here’s a common problem that I have seen: Plug a USB flash drive into your computer and it’s says ready to use, but for some reason nothing shows up in the list of drives. Take it out, plug it back in and still nothing shows up!!! What the heck is the problem? Well, it could be several things, but the most common issue is that the drive letter Windows is trying to assign to your device is already taken by some other drive or maybe mapped to a network drive.

Sadly, Windows XP does not figure this out itself (which is should) and your drive is basically lost in la-la land somewhere. In order to fix it, we need to go to Computer Management and change the drive letter there manually. There are two ways to get to the Computer Management dialog in Windows, one through Control Panel and the second by right-clicking My Computer and choosing Manage.

Right-click My Computer

Computer Management in Administrative Tools

Click on Disk Management under the Storage section and the right side will show you all of the current drives and partitions on your drive. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, just find the drive you are looking for in the graphs at the bottom. They are usually named Disk 0, Disk 1, CD-ROM, CD-ROM1, etc. If you’re looking for a USB flash drive, you’ll see the word “Removable” underneath Disk X.

As you can see from my computer, I plugged in a USB flash drive and it’s currently assigned drive letter is F. If you want to change this, right-click in the white space to the right of the drive letter and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Click the Change button in the dialog box and then pick a new letter from the drop-down list. Just for your info, the Mount in the following NTFS folder option is used if you had right clicked on an external hard drive and instead of giving it a drive letter, you wanted to just have it show up as a folder on your current hard drive. That means you could create a folder in My Documents called pictures that actually points to another hard drive instead of one where all of your My Documents are currently stored.

Click Ok twice and your drive should now have the new letter assigned. Usually, if you USB stick was not showing up before, once you change the letter, it will automatically pop up and ask you what you want to do. And that’s about it! You can also use Disk Management to format disks, determine the type of File System, and see the amount of free space available.

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14 Responses to “How to change the drive letter in Windows XP for an external USB stick or hard drive”

Shahid said on : August 14th, 2007 at 10:33 am

Can i increase the drive letter of windows to more than Z …like AA BB CC …..

akishore said on : August 14th, 2007 at 10:45 am

Hi Shahid,

It is currently not possible to have more than 26 drive letters in Windows. However, this does not mean you cannot have more than 26 drives attached to your computer. You can mount a hard drive to an empty folder on your computer using Disk Management.

However, if you want to connect to more than 26 network shares on a server at once, this is not possible, it must be a new and empty hard disk.

I will write a post on how to mount an external hard drive to an empty NTFS folder soon.

Thanks!

HP said on : August 31st, 2007 at 2:16 am

Thanks for the tip.
However, what do I have to do that this is not necessary each time I reconnect the drive after reboot?
REgards,
HP

Dave said on : September 15th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

I’ve done everything you’ve said to assign a drive letter to my external USB hard drive. The drive is recognized in Disk Manager and Device Manager, but drive letter assignment is not avail. for the drive (though it is available for the internal drives). I’m running Vista, and this problem arose only after reinstalling the OS. Thanks for your help, if possible.

LAKEISHA said on : January 3rd, 2008 at 9:11 pm

I REALLY REALLY NEED HELP. I did what it said above about the flash drive and disk management and it does not give me the option to change the drive letter at all. I see my “c” or hardrive, i see my “d” drive or cd/drive and then i see one that says disk 0 which i am assuming is my flash drive because when i put it in the usb port it does not give me that usual “removable e,f,g,h” etc. I followed the directions above and when i right click on it, it only gives me properties or help unlike the other two drives it actually says change drive letter. PLEASE PLEASE HELP ME. I have some important documents on the flash drive and i really need it to open up. thanks so much

akishore said on : January 4th, 2008 at 9:33 am

HP, once you assign the letter to the USB drive the first time, it will show up automatically even when you reboot.

Daniel & Lakeisha - If Windows is not allowing you to change the drive letter, try out a USB drive letter changing program like USBDLM here http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html. It’s freeware for personal use.

CH said on : January 20th, 2008 at 4:12 pm

Thanks…

Vladimir said on : February 27th, 2008 at 10:28 am

In windows XP, when I put a USB drive, XP tries to map the drive to letter F:. But F: is used to map a network. In windows 2000 the drive is maped to the next free drive.

There is some configuration to make in xp to work like Win 2000?

akishore said on : February 27th, 2008 at 11:25 am

Vladimir, you have to follow the above mentioned steps to change the drive letter manually in Windows XP for your USB drive! It’s very annoying, but that’s the only way in your case.

Jeremy Harris said on : April 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 am

Thanks for the tip! The included screenshots made the tutorial a breeze.

Jeremy Harris said on : April 3rd, 2008 at 11:57 am

oops…last email didn’t contain correct URL to website.

George said on : April 6th, 2008 at 1:32 pm

Thanks so much, i unplugged my external harddrive which was in location (E:) but when i plugged it back in it was in (F:), which meant none of music played because the paths were to (E:), anyway its all sorted, thanks again!

Lazarus Arguelles said on : April 12th, 2008 at 10:54 am

My CD Drive Letter (E) and my Hard Drive Letter (I) have switched and now the letter (I) is not an option. I change the CD Drive back to Letter (E) but when I go to do the same for my Hard Drive Letter (I) is not an option.