Rename Drives

I just added a hard drive and want to rename it. I know about the renaming in Disk Management, etc.

Problem. My Boot is C: The two CDs are D & E. Iwant to rename tne new drive D and bump the CD names up to E & F but that option does not appear in the choices of new letters.

 

drive letter choices...

tenbob,
If you have MS powertoy 'TweakUI' installed (or any *tweak* program) make sure the drive 'letters' are enabled. TweakUI allows you to control what drive letters are allowed to display in Windows.
Also I recommend PeteC's suggestion to change your optical drives to X and Y, this keeps them out of the way if you ever add hard drives or partitions.

B

 

I have done this thing before, and was unable because the D & E (opticals) did not show in the drive list, Only F so I was unable to name D & E to X & Y as suggested

 

tenbob,
If you don't have TweakUI (ms Powertoys for WindowsXP) go HERE and download it. After you install TweakUI... open the program and go to the listing for 'MyComputer', then expand the 'Drives' listing and check all the drive letters you want to enable, then see if the drive letters show up in the management console. I don't think you have to reboot after enabling the drive letters in TweakUI (but it wouldn't hurt). Hope this helps out... it's these little quirks in Windows that can drive you bananas.

B

 

Wait - something is not right - You said your opticals with their current drive letter assignments do not show up in the drive list. They should. If you double click on My Computer, are they all there? What OS are you using? If this system has been upgraded from Windows98 or before, perhaps you have a lastdrive= statement in your autoexec.bat or config.sys - I forget now which one it goes in. You can open a command prompt and type set to display your current environment variables. See if there is a lastdrive setting.

For years, I have made my CD Q drive and my DVD V drive. In this way, if I add a drive or partition, the HD letters fall in line after C, D, E, etc. It is just a habit now.

Note - if you have installed any software on that new drive, it may not work after you reassigned the letter since the registry will still list the old letter for file locations.

 

First of all, I am using Win XP-Home and have for some time.

Perhaps I am not making myself clear.

In "My Computer" the opticals show fine as D & E
The opticals work fine and react properly to D & E.

In DriveManagement OR TweakUI. The D & E are not shown at all so I cannot change them to X & Y, which sounds like a good idea.

In both of those, I only see C & F - both HD.

 

a shot in the dark...

Since this is XP Home... have you tried changing the drive letters in SafeMode while using the Administrator account? I don't have XP Home so I can't try this, but I do know you are rather limited to what you can change without logging on as the administrator. HTH

B

 

tenbob

In Start > control panel > administrative tools > computer management > disk management: Highlight CD and rt-click > choose change drive letter...

 

As I said before, the CD does not show at all so I cannot rt-click it.

 

Use your navigation bar and go to the bottom of the right hand part of the page - its there - you just haven't seen it yet.

 

Agreed - when you click on Disk Managemtent there should be two panes on the right. If you don't see 2 panes or your opticals listed, go to the menu bar on top and click View, Bottom, and click on Disk List or Graphical View - make sure Hidden or Volume are not checked.

 

OK Two panes were the HD drives and the page was windowed instead of full page. When I opened it up, the opticals appeared and I was able to fix everything. I made the HD F drive into the D: and since I have not installed any software on it, I have no problem with the registry.

I know there is a way to re-assign the registry stuff but I will not need it.

thanks to all and everyone's patience with my blind spot !!

 

Great! Thanks for the followup!

 

Just one more gotcha!! Someone suggested naming the opticals X & Y Sounded like a good idea so I did.

I never could see them at all in explorer. Just the C & D HDs showed up. They were OK in Device Mgr so I wasn't too concerned.

Went back in and named the Opticals E & F. All OK now.

Now to put back the drivers for my external Iomega zip. Fully expect it to show up a Q or W

 

Well, I suggested Q and V - so that's close! Your drives should have shown up in explorer as your set them - so don't know why not but at least your HDs were correct.