Drive Letters, will they be overwritten or reassigned?

Hey Everyone,

Good day to all of you!

I bought 2 new 3tb WD My Books that I will getting next week. First, the two that I have currently have a Drive letter of E and F. I am doing a wipe and a clean install of Windows 10 pro x64 once I get the new drives. After the wipe and clean install, I will be plugging one at a time the new HDD's. Once I start plugging in the hard drives I had previously what will happen? Does windows reassign them automatically the drive letters or will they override the new drives? Because I don't want them to override the new hard drives.

Thank you for your help and assistance!

if you want to assign new letters to the new drives and keep you current drive letters assigned like they are now i suggest you take a screenshot of pc so you can manually reassign the various drive letters. i have the following saved in a folder on my backup drive called post os install. hope this helps.



fyi after fixing the drive letter assignments i hide the drive letters so everything lines up numerically and alphabetically

xXWhacerXx said:

if you want to assign new letters to the new drives and keep you current drive letters assigned like they are now i suggest you take a screenshot of pc so you can manually reassign the various drive letters. i have the following saved in a folder on my backup drive called post os install. hope this helps.



fyi after fixing the drive letter assignments i hide the drive letters so everything lines up numerically and alphabetically

Thank you for your help and assistance xXWhacerXx! If you can clarify this first, because I believe I saw a warning on this that by changing the drive letter can ruin other things that are mapped to it. I would like to not change the drive letters once they are assigned, but if you are not having any problems I guess that could be something that I saw wrong.

Also, do you think that having the drive letters as explained before and plugging in the other ones that had the same drive letter will overwrite the new ones or change them automatically?

now if you have items that are mapped as in another computer on the network seeing the drive, then yes when you click on the item from that computer and the drive letter has changed it won't find it. but as far as just accessing secondary drives on the same computer no the drive letters changing won't have any adverse effect, unless say you have various files from you main drive stored on a secondary drive. for example some people move their programs to a second drive to save space on c and c accesses the files on that drive to run the installed program(s).

if i understand you correctly you want to rerun your os, hookup the new drives and not have their drive letters automatically changed? if that's the case then they will keep whatever letter windows or you assigned to them no matter how many drive you attach after them.

xXWhacerXx said:

now if you have items that are mapped as in another computer on the network seeing the drive, then yes when you click on the item from that computer and the drive letter has changed it won't find it. but as far as just accessing secondary drives on the same computer no the drive letters changing won't have any adverse effect, unless say you have various files from you main drive stored on a secondary drive. for example some people move their programs to a second drive to save space on c and c accesses the files on that drive to run the installed program(s).

if i understand you correctly you want to rerun your os, hookup the new drives and not have their drive letters automatically changed? if that's the case then they will keep whatever letter windows or you assigned to them no matter how many drive you attach after them.

Thank you again xXWhacerXx for your response, time and assistance. You are understanding correctly. To reiterate to make sure I am understanding. When I start afresh, by rerunning or installing a clean install of Windows and then start to plug-in the hard drives one by one, Windows will assign the drive letter that is first available and go down the list of other drives I plug-in there after, but any previous drive letters that were assigned before the clean isntall will be forgotten?

How am I doing so far?

Thank you again!

you my friend are spot on

xXWhacerXx said:

you my friend are spot on

Excellent xXWhacerXx! You are da best! I am really appreciated of your help. You never know what questions come up and if they do I will post again, so keep following the thread if you can!:) For now, it looks like I am ready to go on this.

I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and hope you have a great rest of the week.

thanks dude hope your turkey day was great too.

xXWhacerXx said:

thanks dude hope your turkey day was great too.