Change the drive letter of second hard drive

While adding a new hard drive to the system after the installation of Windows XP, the drive letters of the new partition succeed that of the optical drive. For those who like to have the optical drive’s letter last in the list under ‘My Computer’, you need to interchange the drive letters.

>Disable optical drive(s) before interchange the drive letters. If the optical drive is active, you won’t be able to interchange the drive letters of the new hard disk and the optical drive. To disable do the following.

> Right click on ‘My Computer’ à ‘Properties’. Under the ‘System properties’ click ‘Hardware’ à ‘Device Manager’. Expand the heading ‘DVD/CD-ROM’ drives. Right click on the listed optical drives and disable them. Exit the ‘Device manager’.

>Now, right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage” from the context menu to bring up “Computer Management”. Select “Disk management” under the heading “Storage”. All the existing partitions will get listed in the right pane. Right click on the drive letter you wish to change and select the option “Change Drive Letter and Paths”. Click on the “Change” button in the next dialog box and choose the new drive letter from the drop down list.

>Since you disabled the optical drive, you will now get the option to assign the drive letter previously assigned to it. Click on “OK” and exit the “Computer Management” application. Now, enable the optical drives you had disabled. Head back to the “Device Manager” and enable optical drives.