Anyway to change the drive letter of 3 drives without removing from PC?

[Denvers Dawgs]

is there anyway to change the drive letter of 3 drives, without having to take them all out of the pc?

Here is what I have
C: OS
D: Recovery Partition
J: 2nd internla hard drive
E: DVD+rw
F: DVD+rw

What I would like to do is change J:>E ,and E:>F:, F:>G:

So is this possible with removing the +rws?

[Denvers Dawgs]

Ok I figured it out. Now when I made the changes it said some programs may not work properly? Anyone ever had any issues after changing Drive letters? If so, what?

[Poppa_Meth]

the problem is that any programs or shortcuts, etc that have file paths stored would be pointed at the old path not the new one. So instead of J:\program files\program\executable.exe your new path would be E:\program files\program\executable.exe but such programs would still be pointing to the first address.

[gadgetguy]

I've never had issues changing drive letters, but I have had some programs that looked for files to be in a specific location. If you change the drive letter of one of those specific locations it could cause a problem. That's all M$ is warning you about.

For example: If you have any applications that use temporary work space, and you designated that space to be on the J: drive, it could cause problems with those applications.

[Denvers Dawgs]

If I were to unplug my 2 dvd+rw drives and then restart my pc, would it change my 2nd hard drive letter to E by default? And then I could reconnect my 2 dvd drives, thus making them F&G?

[hech54]

Just do like i did and stick a post-it note on the side of the computer stating which drive is which(and in my case...which burner is set for region 1 and which burner is set for region 2)....

[SLK001]

If I were to unplug my 2 dvd+rw drives and then restart my pc, would it change my 2nd hard drive letter to E by default? And then I could reconnect my 2 dvd drives, thus making them F&G?

You don't have to do that. I don't know how you solved your problem, but you can use CONTROL PANEL > ADMIN TOOLS > COMP MGMT > STORAGE > DISK MGMT (!) to reassign your drives (even optical) to whatever letters you want. If one drive is assigned a letter that you want another drive to have, you must reassign the first one (if its final letter is currently occuppied) to a letter currently not used. Right click on the VOLUME and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths...". This will popup a dialog box, which you click on "Change". This will popup another dialog box that has a pulldown selection of all the available drive numbers. Select the one you want. This way you can get them in the order that you want.

I do this for my third hard drive. It would normally be "E:", but I have it reassigned to the last drive in my chain (J:).

I never liked the way MS assigned the drive numbers. At least now, we can set them as we like.

[redwudz]

I assumed you used 'Computer Management' in 'Administrative Tools' to change the drive letter assignments?

You are probably aware A and B are reserved for floppies and C should most always be your boot drive.

What I do if I have additional temporary drives is name my optical drives with letters further down the list and leave a space for D, E, F, G or how many temp drives you have. Windows will then use them for the temp drive letters. Then I call my optical drives something like I, J. I have drives on my server named U, V, W, X, Y, Z. This keeps the permanent drives with fixed letters, even if you reboot and change temp drives in and out.

You have more than 20 possible assignments for drive letters.

My setup looks something like this:

[Denvers Dawgs]

All set guys, figured it all out. Thanks for all the help