How to Assign a Drive Letter to a USB Drive

Your computer may not recognize a USB drive without a drive letter.

If you are having difficulties getting your computer to recognize your USB drive, you may need to assign a drive letter to the peripheral hardware. A drive letter is the name given to a disk drive on a PC, including CD-ROM drives, hard disk drives and flash memory or USB drives. If another computer can recognize the USB drive and your computer will not, even after loading the appropriate drivers, check to make sure your system has assigned a drive letter to and thus recognizes the USB drive.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• USB drive

1. Click the "Start" button in the lower left corner of your computer's desktop.

2. Right-click "Computer" in the list that appears.

3. Select the "Manage" option. If a warning box appears asking your permission to continue, click the "OK" button.

4. Choose the "Disk Management" option from the left-hand column of the Computer Management window. Find the USB drive in the list that appears in the gray lower portion of the center column.

5. Right-click the portion of the screen that represents the USB drive, and then click the "Change Drive Letter and Paths..." option.

6. Click the "Change..." button in the window that opens.

7. Make sure the radio button next to "Assign the following drive letter:" is chosen. To the right of this is a drop-down box with drive letters currently not assigned to any drives on your local system. If you are not on a network, choose the desired drive letter for your USB drive, and then click the "OK" button.

   If you are on a network and have mapped network drives that have an assigned letter, these drive letters will appear to be available even though they are not. When you choose an apparently available letter, an error box appears that indicates you cannot use that letter. In this case, choose a different letter until you find one that is not in use.

8. Click the "Yes" button in the confirmation box that appears.

Tips & Warnings

• It is always a good idea to let the installation wizard run when inserting a USB drive into your computer, if you do not let the wizard run, there is a good chance your computer will not recognize the USB drive.

• The hard drive and the CD/DVD-ROM drive letters should never be changed, as this can affect the operation of your computer.

References

• Real Knowledge: Drive Letter -- Definition
• Microsoft Windows Vista Help: Change, Add, or Remove a Drive Letter