Renaming an External Hard Drive & Changing a Drive Letter
I apologize in advance for an extremely quiet blog. Family comes first and I have dedicated my time to my family and extended family in the last few weeks.
I know I run with multiple External Hard Drive’s (EHDs) and I hate the names that get assigned to them (Mybook, simpletech, etc) I really like to change the name of the drive so I can easily recognize what is on the drive. It’s really simple to do:
How to rename a drive
On Vista:
- Open Computer by clicking the Start button
, and then clicking Computer.
- Right-click the drive or device you want to rename, and then click Rename.
If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
- Type a new name, and then press ENTER.
On XP:
- Open My Computer by clicking the Start Button and then clicking My Computer
- Right-click the drive or device you want to rename, and then click Rename.
- Type a new name, and then press ENTER.
Here’s my drives with how I renamed them:
Renaming a drive shouldn’t affect any software or your computer.
How to change a drive letter
In addition, I sometimes change my drive letter. When new devices come online, they usually get assigned the first available letter. I like to change my EHD’s to have a letter later in the alphabet so they always have a consistent letter. (If they get assigned a letter early in the alphabet, like E:, and something else comes online, then they make get assignment like F:)
Here are the instructions on how to change a drive letter from Microsoft.
- How to change drive letter assignments in Windows XP
- On Vista: Change, add, or remove a drive letter and in step 4, following the instructions for changing a drive letter.
From my screenshot above, you can see I have change my drive letters to S: & U:
Changing a drive letter, can affect software and your computer, but most software will update automatically. I recommend closing all software though before you do the change. The one thing that won’t be updates is any paths referring to the old drive letter will be broken. Usually there are not too many of these and its a quick change. In the case of ACDSee software, it will not affect your organizing since ACDSee recognizes your drives by the their serial/volume number. The few exceptions are:
- If you moved your ACDSee database to the EHD you specified a path and this path needs to be updated.
- If you sync, your paths need to be updated
- If you set your start folder to a path, this needs to be updated.
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