Category: Geeks r Us
Awhile back I had gotten my computer fixed and when I got it back, I noticed that all my drive letters were different. For drives C, D, E and F, it says "removable disk" and then the letter. My CD drive is G, and my local disk is H, and when I have a jump drive plugged in that's letter I. Plus there's a recovery R drive, which when I go into it it shows my documents and stuff like that. I would like to know if there's a way to change the letters of these drives, and why I have 4 removable drives that I can't get into, and why they're there. It would also make it easier when I install programs, because usually they want to install on drive C, but since my C drive no longer exists, I just change it to H and it doesn't have a problem. So this really isn't a problem so much as an annoyance, but I want to know would it be worth it to change the drive letters? Would I have to erase everything on my hard drive first in order to do that? And why do I have these extra drives in the first place if I can't get into them? Any help would be appreciated.
In the case of the extra removable disk drives are you certain that whoever messed with your box didn't add any more drives? And, are you sure that they are just extra partitions? As for reasigning drive letters you can do this by going to computer management, and arrowing to storage and under storage is disk management. Tab once to get into the drive list and you should hear local disk c ntfs size active. Right click on this and go to change drive letter and paths... in here you can change the letter.
When I try to open the extra drives, it gives an error message, something like "drive not ready." That's why I think it's pointless for them to be there if they're not going to do anything.
You can't just say, oh they aren't supposed to be there so let's remove them. There is some logical reason why they are there. If it is telling you to please insert a disk, then look on the tower itself to see if there are any new slots or bays that were added since then. If there are no extra drives that you can tell, then they may be partitions, in which case they might show up under disk management.
Try going into disk manager and getting rid of them that way?
Another thought is to right click on these drives that won't let you access them and and see what info is in the properties window like file system type and size of the partition. If it says 0 bites for each of them then you can just remove them without worrying about loosing anything.
They are physical drives, so I can't remove them. I just wanted to know, that's all. Like I said before, it's not a big deal, I just wanted to know why they were there, and now that I do, problem solved.
My guess would be you have a compact flash/internal card reader in your box that got picked up and xp decided to give your boot drive h:. If you really want to get drive c back to where it should be, disable the reader or extra devices in the bios, reinstall xp and go.
Yeah, you most likely have a card reader which is taking up a bunch of drive letters. Be careful about trying to reassign the drive letter of your primary hard drive though. I've never done this before, but I'm not sureWindows is smart enough to automatically remap all your paths. In other words, since it's looking for all its system files on H now. If you suddenly reassign it to C, will Windows know enough to adjust, or will it just crash? I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I would want to take that gamble.
Al
Neither would I.
Or reasign it with some software. Powerquest partition manager should allso search for paths and remap it.
It did it for me when I was merging two partitions together.
"They are physical drives, so I can't remove them. I just wanted to know, that's all. Like I said before, it's not a big deal, I just wanted to know why
they were there, and now that I do, problem solved."
"problem solved."
Why people keep posting to this thread baffles me.
Physical drives can be removed, don't say they can't when in fact, they can. Ya just gota take off the side pannel of the tower, possibly take off the front pannel, and then, ya gota know where the cables are, unplug them, remove the drive guard thingies on the side (don't remember what they're called), and just take the drive out. So, they can in fact, be removed, if you really wanted to.
Thanks for the info. I decided not to do it because if we're talking about remapping system files, then I won't mess with it.
Jeff's right. Its not that hard, but if u have never done it before, u may wanna ask some one about it. Cody had to describe to me what everything looked or rather felt like, because he had forgotten to hook up the zip drive, and that's how i learned how to hook up drives. O, and jeff, r u talking about screws?