How to change the drive letter in Windows 7. Change of letters of usual and system sections

Any Windows user, sooner or later, may encounter a situation in which there will be a need to change the drive letters. To understand how to change the letter of the Windows 7 hard drive, you do not need in-depth knowledge of the system, accuracy and care are enough.

Causes

In most cases, such procedures are not related to the functioning of the computer, but are a consequence of the desire for a certain ordering. The operating system independently assigns letters to each drive in alphabetical order, starting with "C" ("A" and "B" are no longer used, although they are still reserved in Windows for floppy drives), but the user may need for one reason or another change this order.

Change letters in regular sections

It is possible to change the drive letter in Windows 7 both using third-party utilities and standard Windows tools. In addition, most special programs, as a rule, are not limited only to changing drive letters, but have much wider functionality, and their application requires some knowledge. Otherwise, everything can end very unpredictably. Therefore, it is easier (and safer) to use the own functionality of the operating system.

On Windows, this is Disk Management. It is here that it is possible to change the drive letter of Windows 7. There are several ways to open it, as usual,:

• Using the "Control Panel" you need to find "Administration", then "Computer Management". In the window on the tab on the left, click "Storage" and "Disk Management".
• RMB on the "Computer", then go to "Management".
• Through "Run", where diskmgmt.msc is entered.

A list of logical partitions (similar to the Computer folder) will be displayed at the top, a list of installed physical media will be displayed at the bottom: the name in the left column and the number of logical volumes in the right column. To change the letter, you should press the right-click the drop-down list, in it - "Change the drive letter or path to the drive", and then mark the letter.

Here you can both change the drive letter in Windows 7, and swap letters. The procedure is carried out in a similar way: replacing it with a free one, then replacing the letter of the second volume, and only then reassigning it. Simultaneously changing the letters of two volumes will not work in places.

Keep in mind that changing the volume letter can adversely affect the health of the applications installed on this drive. After this procedure, most programs and games may malfunction or stop working altogether. To restore functionality, you will have to change the letter back or completely reinstall the application. Editing some system files and editing registry keys can help, but this process is quite time-consuming (and does not always help), so it makes sense to take care of this problem in advance.

Change the system partition letter

How to change the drive letter in Windows 7 on a system volume without subsequent OS recovery? To answer this question, it is necessary to understand that this operation makes sense only in situations in which the system drive is mistakenly assigned any letter except "C", which most often happens when two or more versions of Windows are installed on one computer. In other words, we are talking about restoring the operating system and installed programs.

The first thing to do is back up the system (using Windows or using third-party utilities).

Regedit Registry Editor

You can change the letter of the system drive in Windows 7 both through the built-in registry editor, and through a special program. The sequence of actions is approximately the same, therefore it is more advisable to consider it using the standard regedit as an example:

1. Type regedit on the Run menu.
2. In the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE tab, go to SYSTEM, then to MountedDevice.
3. In the right part of the window, find the key \ DosDevices \ C :.
4. Call the context menu (RMB), click "Rename", replace "C" with any letter not used by the system (For example, L).
5. Among the registry keys, find the line with the designation of the drive needed to rename (for example, E), then use the same algorithm to replace the current letter with C.
6. Rename L to E.
7. To restart a computer.

If everything is done correctly, Windows will boot successfully, and the system partition will have the letter C.

By following these instructions exactly, you can change the drive letter in Windows 7 both when necessary to clean up the OS, and to fix errors when installing the OS.