Drive letters

I am having a new computer built. It will have two hard drives, CD ROM, and DVD R/W. There will be no floppy drive and I guess Windows will designate the hard drives C and D. C will of course have the operating system. I would like to have the second hard drive named something at the end of the alphabet. Z would be fine.

The person building the machine says that the operating system, Windows XP Professional, will name the hard drives sequentially, so my second drive will be drive D. Is there a way to designate this second drive with the letter Z at the time it is installed? He doesn't know of a way to do this.

I have previously tried re-naming the drive, and while Windows is glad to let me call it anything I want, it still recognizes the drive by it's original designation, drive D. This results in anything I stick in a USB port being named G.

There is nothing in the Windows Knowledge Base that I can find. Can anyone help?

Paul

 

Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management -> Right Click on Drive D and select Change Drive Letters...

Don't do this if you have programs on Drive D, they'll break unless you reinstall them. There's no problem with Data though.

PS The Administrative tools is maybe a giveaway , you need to have admin rights to do this.

 

Hello march. Just be sure not to use a letter that is already being used by another drive.

 

march

I'd be a little concerned if the person building your machine doesn't know how to rename drives or re-letter drives - this is pretty basic stuff. He/she should be doing the OS installation with only one drive attached. Upon completion, he/she can hook up your second drive and designate it anything they want, including Z. And, while it has been correctly stated that the drop down won't show you drive letters already in use, you can re-letter any drive you want with the exception of your C drive. Actually, one can also re-letter a C drive but its no easy task and it can't be done through disk management.

 

hello PeteC. Thanks for jarring my memory. It has been a long time since I had to do that(can't remember ever having to). Looked it up for someone once, remember said was a bad thing to have 2 with same designation.