change drive letters in Win 98

John,
This is done in Device Manager (Start>Settings>Control Panel)
Open the System icon. Click the Device Manager tab. Open the CD-ROM and CD-RW disk drives icon. Click your disk drive's entry once to select it. Click the Properties button. Click the Settings tab. Choose your new drive letter from the Start drive letter drop-down list. Click OK to close the disk drive's Properties dialog box. Click OK to close the System Properties dialog box

One word of warning: if you change the CD-ROM drive letter and already have software that expects the CD-ROM to be, say, drive E, then your software might need to be re-installed or re-configured. That's the drawback to changing letters.

Note:You might have to re-install some applications that lose track of the re-lettered disk drive as I mentioned.
You cannot change the drive letters of hard drives or floppy drives.

Pamela

John,

Pamela is right on in her advice, especially her "One word of warning..."

If you are still early in your reinstall, or you are going to reassign those CDROM and CDR/RW letters anyway, you should pick letters way further into the alphabet. (For no particular reason I chose S and T for my CD and CDRW.) This will allow you to do things in the future - like add another HD, partition a HD, add a Zip drive, etc - without messing up the the CD letter assignments.

For example: If you do choose the usual "D" and "E", and later add a second HD, that new HD will demand to be "D" and push your CDs to "E" and "F". Then you might have to reinstall some programs that require or use a CD. (I had this problem with Word and Publisher not being able to access clipart on their CDs.) -- Leaving a bunch of unused letters between your HD and CDs eliminates this potential problem.


Rock The Casbah,

Dave Wilson
XPS R 1
Windows 98 - IE 6
512 Mb SDRAM
STB 16 Mb TNT
TB Montego II
"It's got a hard drive."

Message Edited on 05/23/02 02:24AM by Dave Wilson