Home | Resource Guides | Tech Tips | Network Administration | Hardware | Certification

Tech Tips › Windows XP › Tools and Tasks

Tech Tips / Windows XP / Tools and Tasks

Learn how to change or work without drive letters

Windows XP contains administrative tools, such as the Disk Management snap-in, that allow you to perform certain tasks that you couldn't perform in Windows 9x.

For example, you can use the Disk Management snap-in to change drive letters.

Follow these steps to change the drive letter in XP:

1. Log on to the computer with administrator rights.
2. Select Performance And Maintenance within Control Panel.
3. Open the Computer Management console from the Administrative Tools folder.
4. Select Disk Management under the Storage tree.
5. Right-click on the partition or device for which you want to change the drive letter.
6. Choose Change Drive Letter And Paths.
7. Select the current drive letter and click Change.
8. Choose Assign The Following Drive Letter, select the drive letter replacement,
   and click OK.

It's also possible to work without drive letters. Instead, you can map or mount a device to a folder on an existing partition. For instance, you can access your CD-ROM device through the cdrom folder on the C: drive or access another hard drive through c:\hd2. All you need to have is an NTFS partition and an empty folder for each device you want to mount.

Here's how to create a mounted drive:

1. Open the Computer Management console from the Administrative Tools folder.
2. Select Disk Management under the Storage tree.
3. Right-click on the partition or device for which you want to change the drive letter.
4. Choose Change Drive Letter And Paths.
5. Click Add.
6. Select Mount In The Following Empty NTFS Folder.
7. Type in the path to an empty NTFS folder on the hard drive.
8. Click OK.