Assign a Letter to your External Drives and Cards

Everyone with a PC and various external hard drives, card readers, and other storage devices will no doubt recognize the frustration of running backup and reader software and getting path not found errors. It usually occurs because you set up the backup or download path with the originally assigned drive letter, but when you’ve been hot swapping different drives, different letters get assigned and the backup or download path fails because the wrong device grabbed a previously assigned drive letter. It’s a pain, but there is a simple solution.

Click the Windows Start button, then the Run… menu item. Cut & paste the following “diskmgmt.msc” without the quotes, or type in diskmgmt.msc and hit return to fire up the Windows Disk Management program.

This program gives you some useful information about your storage devices, including your internal hard drive. Right-click once to select the device you want to work with and to display the context menu for that drive. Select menu item “Change Drive Letter and Paths” and then the “change…” button. So far, so simple.

A list of available drive letters will be displayed, select the letter you wish to use, then click okay. I chose “I” for my external Iomega drive, L is assigned by default to my Linkstation, and I use an F for my Flash card reader. Other devices, such as cameras get their own drive letter, although don’t whatever you do, try to assign C to your camera. One caveat don’t assign a memory card reader to “B”, it will break Autoplay.

Now, next time you hot swap devices and try running errant programs, they should all work in perfect harmony based on their assigned drive letters.