How to Change a Drive Letter on Windows 10 or Windows 11

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Change drive windows 10. How to Change a Drive Letter

 

If you want to change primary hard drive in Windows 10, 8, 7, 11 or make the second hard drive as the startup drive, read this article and you will know how to change boot hard drive in Windows PC in detailed steps. Windows was installed on C drive.

Currently, all new programs are getting installed by default on C drive. I do not have the option to choose where they will be installed. How can I change the primary drive and make the second bigger SSD drive as the primary one? Anyone can help? From the above user case, we can know that users might want to replace a smaller older hard drive with a bigger new hard drive when the current hard drive is almost full of system files, programs and other personal files. Besides that, another main reason for changing startup drive is to upgrade a slow hard disk to a faster SSD drive when your Windows OS is now installed on a mechanical traditional hard disk drive that tends to slow in accessing data.

Or you can change the primary hard drive by migrating OS to another disk. Those are two practical methods and you can follow the tutorials to get the complete info. Before proceeding: check whether the partition stlyes of the target and source primary drive are same. Step 1. Step 2. Select the empty USB as the target drive, and follow the onscreen instructions to create a bootable USB drive for installation.

Step 3. Then remove the old system disk, insert the new disk you want to make as new primary drive and the bootable USB to your computer, reboot it, enter BIOS, change boot priority and boot computer from the installation media.

Step 4. Step 6. Step 7. At last, you can shut down your computer, remove the installation USB drive, reinsert the old hard drive to your computer and use it as a data drive. And you don't need to worry that you cannot boot Windows from the new disk afterward. If you have to choose this option, please back up all necessary data on the disk beforehand. Then comes a boot note. Wait for the process to complete, and then you can restart your computer, enter BIOS setup, change boot order to boot computer from the new startup disk.

Some users are searching for a way to change the local disk C to D, namely, moving OS from C drive to D drive so as to make D partition as the boot partition. You can choose either of those two methods above.

Why change primary hard drive in Windows 10? Method 1. Change boot disk by fresh or clean installation complex To clean install the Windows on another disk and make it bootable, you need to prepare an empty USB 8GB min , download Windows Media Creation Tool and Windows product key activate after installation. Step 5. Input the license key, or skip it and activate it after Windows install completes. Method 2. Still Need Help? Have your problem been solved? If not, please input query in the search box below.

 

Change drive windows 10

 

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Detect Hidden Surveillance Cameras. Dark Mode on Every Website in Chrome. Disable Bing in Windows 10 Start Menu. Hide Steam Games You're Playing. Use Your iPhone as a Webcam. Browse All Buying Guides. Say you purchase an external drive and wish to change its drive letter, right? And you're doing this because you already have another drive with the same letter as the external.

You can easily do all this without having to resort to complex instructions, and that is very convenient. This freedom to customize your storage devices the way you want is also a welcome addition to computer usage.

Assigning letters in alphabetical order to drives is a simple way to keep them organized. It benefits you because it will be easier to know what files or programs are installed on which drive.

You don't have to waste precious time by going through random locations to find your files. The first thing you need to know here is this: You cannot change the drive letter of the drive where your Windows is installed on.

The only way for you to do that is to do a clean install of the Windows itself; but why go through all that trouble just to change a simple letter? With that being said, and except for your operating system's default drive, you have much leeway when it comes to changing drive letters. Even though Windows automatically assigns a drive letter to any external storage device you connect to it, there are unique occasions where it tries to give an already-assigned letter to a new drive.

It thus nullifies the action and prevents the drive from showing up in "File Explorer. Kicking off the tutorial will be "Disk Management. When the "Run" window pops up, type this command in its search field: diskmgmt. You will see a list of drives in the "Disk Management" window. Pick out the one you want to change the letter of, then right-click on it and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths. Right beside the "Assign the following drive letter" option, you will see a drop-down menu.

Select the drive letter you want Windows to give the storage device from this menu. Click on "OK" and select "Yes". Close "Disk Management" and your drive will now be bearing a brand-new letter. Click on "command prompt". After the command prompt opens up, right-click on it, and select "Run as administrator. Type diskpart in the command window and hit "Enter", then type list volume and press "Enter" again.

You will see a list of simple volumes under "Volume. One of them will be the drive you want to assign a new letter. Knowing which of them is the drive shouldn't be too hard. Just look at each of their corresponding sizes under the "Size" category.

And that's it. Close the "command prompt" tool and restart your PC and you should see your drive rocking the new letter you just assigned to it. Press the "Windows" key and type "Windows PowerShell" in the search bar.

Here you can edit the partition size on the target disk according to your needs. Step 6. It will give you a Note about how to boot computer after clone or migration. Read it and click Finish. Step 7. Finally, click Apply at the toolbar and click Proceed to execute the task. After cloning everything from the old hard drive to the new one, you can shut down the computer and install the new disk for replacement. For desktop, it is easy to install a second hard drive because it is usually equipped with more than one hard drive bay.

After installation, you need to enter BIOS to change boot priority, and move the cloned hard disk on the top one of the boot order. In this case, you need to: Turn off your PC. Open the case, remove the old disk and put in the new hard drive, attach the cables and secure the drive with screws. Clone the case, turn on the power and it will boot from the cloned hard drive.

And it has many other advanced features that can make up the shortages of Windows Disk Management, including converting disk between MBR and GPT without deleting volumes, allocating free space from one partition to another, splitting a large partition into two smaller ones. Method 1. Besides that, another main reason for changing startup drive is to upgrade a slow hard disk to a faster SSD drive when your Windows OS is now installed on a mechanical traditional hard disk drive that tends to slow in accessing data.

Or you can change the primary hard drive by migrating OS to another disk. Those are two practical methods and you can follow the tutorials to get the complete info. Before proceeding: check whether the partition stlyes of the target and source primary drive are same. Step 1. Step 2. Select the empty USB as the target drive, and follow the onscreen instructions to create a bootable USB drive for installation. Step 3.