Generally speaking, there are two situations when you need to change the USB drive letter in Windows. Situation one is that the drive letter is not showing on your computer. Since there is no problem with your USB drive, no matter how you unplug it and plug it back, it is in vain. There might be several reasons but the most common reason is that the drive letter that Windows is trying to assign to your USB flash drive has already been taken by another drive.
Another scenario is when you have several USB drives connecting to your computer. You will notice that the drive letter is different every time even when you plug the USB into the same computer. Since Windows will assign the drive letter to the drive automatically, this will lead to some problems if you want to use a USB drive or another external hard drive as a backup tool on the same drive letter, as the target backup drive is usually set according to its drive letter.
To solve the above problem, you can change the drive letter of your USB flash drive. Assigning a static drive letter to a USB drive could prevent the order of chaos in an effective way if you don’t want to change the basic hard drive letter on your hard drive. Here are the two solutions to change an external USB drive letter in Windows 10/8/7. Just check the following steps.
How to Change USB Drive Letter with Windows Disk Management?
Step1: Plug in your USB drive on the computer and Windows will recognize it. All drive information will be listed on the Windows Disk Management utility.
Step2: Open the Windows Disk Management by pressing Windows and R key on your keyboard, typing diskmgmt.msc and clicking OK to open Disk Management.
Step 3: You can see all the disk information listed on the screen, find the removable USB drive and right-click it, then click the Change Drive Letter and Paths.
Step 4: Then click on the Change button, and assign a drive letter that you need. All the listing drive letters can be chosen, and here it will change to H. You will get a message, “some programs that rely on drive letters might not run correctly. Do you want to continue?” Just click Yes to continue.
How to Assign Drive Letter to USB Drive with 3rd Party Tool
Besides the Windows Disk Management utility, you can also change the USB drive letter with AOMEI Partition Assistant.
As a partition manager for Windows users, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is free partition software for personal and commercial use. It serves more than two million users and helps them to solve all kinds of partition and hard drive issues. Let me see check how it works on assigning a drive letter to a USB drive easily and safely.
Step1: Download the freeware, install and open it;
Step2: Select and right-click the removable USB drive, choose the Advanced feature and tick the Change Drive Letter button on the following screen.
Step3: In the next screen, you can change the drive letter as per your requirements by clicking the New Drive Letter, and all other drive letters can be chosen except for those which have already been taken up. Here we will change the H partition to the G partition. Then click OK to continue the following procedure. Note, if you are choosing None, the current drive letter will be removed.
Step 4: Check the Pending Operations and if there is no problem, just click Apply to finish the operation.
Summary
From the above steps, you can change the USB drive letters in Windows with a few clicks quickly and easily, by using both Windows Disk Management and AOMEI Partition Assistant.
AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard works well in Windows 10, 8/8.1, and Windows 7. Besides assigning a drive letter to a USB drive, you can also use AOMEI Partition Assistant to solve the other USB hard drive issues such as removing USB write protection, fixing the ‘USB device not recognized in Windows“, to migrate OS to SSD Windows 10, to partition USB drive in Windows and so on.
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