How do I unassign a fixed drive letter to a USB Drive

I used a USB drive as my target for File History. I changed it's drive letter to H. It somehow because a "fixed" letter. When the drive was full, I removed it & plugged in another USB drive & wanted to give it the same letter (easier for me to remember what it's for).

However, every time I used disk management to change the drive letter to H, it changed back. Eventually, I was able to use an app, "USB Safely Remove" to "share" the drive letter H, with the warning that both couldn't be plugged in at the same time.

1. How did the first drive get to be a "Fixed" drive in the first place?

2. How can I unassign that first fixed drive, because I want to format it (preferably without removing the current Drive H?

3. What would I "break" if I plugged both in at the same time?

Thank you in advance!

1. E.g. via Disk Management - assign it a new drive letter.
2. I would have thought you would simply remove the drive letter...
3. If you have, say, assigned drive letter H: to 2 flash drives, the first will no longer be assigned H:
Therefore when you now insert the first, it is allocated the earliest available letter; the second will be H:

That gives you a second way of unassigning a drive, of course.

dalchina said:

1. E.g. via Disk Management - assign it a new drive letter.
2. I would have thought you would simply remove the drive letter...
3. If you have, say, assigned drive letter H: to 2 flash drives, the first will no longer be assigned H:
Therefore when you now insert the first, it is allocated the earliest available letter; the second will be H:

That gives you a second way of unassigning a drive, of course.

Thank you so much for your explanation. I still seem to be having trouble. When I put both of the drives in, the 2nd drive becomes hidden. I used USB Safely Remove to try to show it & I got this message:



Even if I assign a different letter to "History" & remove it, plugging it back in causes the same issue. I went to Disk Management & it gave these options:



It seems that if I assign a different letter to the History drive, unplug it, & then plug it back in, I get the conflict again. Is there a way to just unassign a fixed letter without changing it to another fixed letter.

Thank you again.

The only sure way I've found to undesignate a particular USB drive is simply to no longer use it and/or delete the partition/s on it in Disk Management then use a new drive for the purpose. Opening Disk Management to view a USB drive can inadvertently get a letter assigned so those I need to be portable I never open in DM. Those drives I need to access on a daily basis I do assign a letter but I seldom unplug them. In earlier versions of Windows the mapping of a NAS drive got Z: then the next got Y:, etc. moving up the alphabet, Win10 didn't automatically do that with the 2 I have attached to my Router but I did as I still have older computers.

Berton said:

The only sure way I've found to undesignate a particular USB drive is simply to no longer use it and/or delete the partition/s on it in Disk Management then use a new drive for the purpose. Opening Disk Management to view a USB drive can inadvertently get a letter assigned so those I need to be portable I never open in DM. Those drives I need to access on a daily basis I do assign a letter but I seldom unplug them. In earlier versions of Windows the mapping of a NAS drive got Z: then the next got Y:, etc. moving up the alphabet, Win10 didn't automatically do that with the 2 I have attached to my Router but I did as I still have older computers.

Thank you for your advice.

I "think" I've been able to unassign the H letter from the History USB. I used the app "USB Safely Remove", clicked on Drive Properties:



It brought up this screen:



I unchecked the box for Fix drive letter & clicked applied. Windows then assigned it to the next available letter & I removed the USB. Now there's no conflict. I will keep your advice in mind, however.

When I experience this, I just backup all the data (if any), delete the partition, and then re-create the partition without assigning a specific drive letter. I use AOMEI Partition Assistant (freeware) to delete/recreate partition.

idgat said:

When I experience this, I just backup all the data (if any), delete the partition, and then re-create the partition without assigning a specific drive letter. I use AOMEI Partition Assistant (freeware) to delete/recreate partition.

Thank you for this information. I’ll keep this in mind for the next time I screw up. 😂

You can remove the drive letter assigned using Disk Management.

dalchina said:

You can remove the drive letter assigned using Disk Management.

Thank you. I had tried that, but as soon as I tried to remove the assigned letter using "Change Drive Letter and Paths..." & then clicking "Remove", it would remove the letter & 2 seconds later the letter would reappear.