Change and Assign Drive Letter in Windows 10  

Use letters late in the alphabet, and label the drive with that letter. One drive per letter. Simple.

VinceB said:

Hi Denis:

Written in Brink's tutorial introduction:

"If you like, you can change the drive letter of a drive to be any available drive letter you want instead of the driver letter automatically assigned by Windows. When you change the drive letter of a drive, it will assign a permanent (not always) letter to the drive that will not change (not always) on your PC unless you change it."

I infer from Brink's info and your comments-- as quoted above-- that an identifying drive letter is stored, internally, within the (USB) drive device so that that ID drive letter is used for subsequent identification no matter which (USB) port the drive device is connected to.

Is my inference correct?

If yes, then my labelling scheme is not helpful, regardless of choosing earlier or later alphabetical letter assignments.
濫

Hello Vince,

Normally, the assigned drive letters are stored in the registry per drive referenced by their volume ID like in option 4.

However, this doesn't always set the drive letter in stone.

VinceB said:

OKay Brink; now I understand it. I was thinking that storage within the actual drive device might create a problem when it is brought to another Win10 PC.

Thanks for explaining here in this tread. You might consider mentioning the storage within the Tutorial Intro.

@Brink,

#1 "Windows reserves the drive letters A and B for floppy drives."

It does not reserve them at all. I routinely assign mine to my backup flash drives & SD cards without any problem at all and have been doing so since WInXP.

#2 You might like to make it clearer that an assigned drive letter is not exclusively reserved for that drive.
- If non-assigned drives are connected then the letters D onwards are allocated in turn.
- If the assigned drive is not connected then Windows will give away its drive letter as part of these allocations.
- If the drive with the assigned drive letter is connected later on then it will simply be allocated the next letter that happens to be available.

Denis

Try3 said:

@Brink,

#1 "Windows reserves the drive letters A and B for floppy drives."

It does not reserve them at all. I routinely assign mine to my backup flash drives & SD cards without any problem at all and have been doing so since WInXP.

#2 You might like to make it clearer that an assigned drive letter is not exclusively reserved for that drive.
- If non-assigned drives are connected then the letters D onwards are allocated in turn.
- If the assigned drive is not connected then Windows will give away its drive letter as part of these allocations.
- If the drive with the assigned drive letter is connected later on then it will simply be allocated the next letter that happens to be available.

Denis

Done.

Hi, I've only seen such a change when another drive has been assigned the same letter, apart from perhaps one occasion when the drive seemed to have lost its assigned letter- when I simply reassigned it.

The trick is to assign a letter late in the alphabet- e.g. R or X or Y.. then there's a small probability you're ever going to plug in or connect or have enough drives to reach that letter.

I would have thought you would simply reassign your preferred letter to that drive.

Sure, with Macrium, you can edit the definition file to change the letter used...

Jaguwaar20 said:

Win 10 recently changed the drive letter on my only external USB drive?

I have also seen this behaviour.
I suggest you
- write a script that runs Dir and then warns you if the expected drive letter does not exist, and
- put a shortcut to that script in your startup folder "C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup"


All the best,
Denis