External Hard Drive Letter Has Changed

  • Thread starter Thread starter rbc
  • Start date Start date
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rbc

I have two exernal hard drives (USB) attached to my PC running Windows XP.
One is K: and Two is L:
After being away for several weeks and restarting my PC the drive letters
swapped over so that Two is now K: and One is L:
Can anybody assist with an explanation as to why this would happen?
Can I safely go into manager and change them back again? (Withous causing
file path problems).
 
You can by disabling one in device mgr,restart pc,once in xp,go to run,
type:diskmgmt.msc In msc,L.click the drive,actions,all,change drive letter/
path,change letter,close out.Reinable other drive,restart pc.
 
rbc said:
I have two exernal hard drives (USB) attached to my PC running Windows XP.
One is K: and Two is L:
After being away for several weeks and restarting my PC the drive letters
swapped over so that Two is now K: and One is L:
Can anybody assist with an explanation as to why this would happen?
Can I safely go into manager and change them back again? (Withous causing
file path problems).
Click to expand...


Seeing as how they don't have problems now with drive letters switched, I
don't see why they would have problems being reassigned their origin drive
letters.

It should be OK to reassign drive letters, unless you recently installed
software and specifically installed on one of drives with the changed drive
letters.
 
Andrew E. said:
You can by disabling one in device mgr,restart pc,once in xp,go to run,
type:diskmgmt.msc In msc,L.click the drive,actions,all,change drive
letter/
path,change letter,close out.Reinable other drive,restart pc.
Click to expand...

You don't need to do all that. Disk Manager will let you reassign drive
letters without rebooting.
 
rbc said:
I have two exernal hard drives (USB) attached to my PC running Windows XP.
One is K: and Two is L:
After being away for several weeks and restarting my PC the drive letters
swapped over so that Two is now K: and One is L:
Can anybody assist with an explanation as to why this would happen?
Can I safely go into manager and change them back again? (Withous causing
file path problems).
Click to expand...

I assume these are external *USB* drives. If drive 1 was disconnected when
the PC was booted then drive 2 would acquire its drive letter. Actually
allocating specific letters from drive manager would prevent this from
happening provided the drives are not connected to different USB ports.
That last constraint does not apply if the drives are electronically serial
numbered (few drives are).
 
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