Relettering Partitions

[Seekermeister]

I tried to I like to assign letters to partitions that make sense to me. I have done this in the past without any problems, but this time, when I changed a letter, it disappeared from the list of available letters, so that it couldn't be reused. which defeats my original purpose. Is there some way that I can restore them?

 

[ebaycj]

What you need to do is actually "remove" the drive letter from a given partition, then "assign" it a new one (instead of "change drive letter"). This is a bug in disk manager.

To refresh the list of drive letters, close out of disk manager and re-open it.

EDIT: ( I assume you're using win2k / xp / 2k3 )

 

[Seekermeister]

I'm using MCE, but that is basically XP. I have closed out the disk management and reopened it several times, but the available drive letters remains the same. I can't reassign it, when it doesn't appear in the list of available letters.

 

[corkyg]

I have found that you have to do this in a two step process.

First, you change the drive letter of the partition to one that is currently on the list of availables. Then you have to exit and restart Windows. The partition should now be using the new letter. Now, its old letter is available. Prior to restart, it was not available. Now, change another parition to that letter. Do another restart. You can now change the first partition to the recently vacated letter of the second. One more restart and it all should be there. I have done this many times in XP Pro. It is not a bug - just the way the process works. Drive letters vacated are not available until after a restart.

 

[Seekermeister]

Odd, I had restarted the system, and still had missing letters. But now they were there as they should have been. I rearranged things as I wanted, but I never had to restart to reuse a letter. I guess it was just a quirk.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: corkyg
I have found that you have to do this in a two step process.

First, you change the drive letter of the partition to one that is currently on the list of availables. Then you have to exit and restart Windows. The partition should now be using the new letter. Now, its old letter is available. Prior to restart, it was not available. Now, change another parition to that letter. Do another restart. You can now change the first partition to the recently vacated letter of the second. One more restart and it all should be there. I have done this many times in XP Pro. It is not a bug - just the way the process works. Drive letters vacated are not available until after a restart.

Actually thats not true, they should be available immediately (as an example, you can reletter a cddrive and the old drive letter is immediately available). Thinking thru what the LDM has to do I bet it comes down to if you have any open file handles on the volume (if you do, it probably mounts the new drive letter but keeps the old one valid as well). Otherwise it should be like running chkdsk where the volume would need to dismount.

Bill