LeeTutor's Doing Windows
Windows Tips Categories
Control Panel Tips
CHANGING YOUR CD-ROM DRIVE LETTER
If you have ever installed a new hard drive, while your
old CD-ROM drive letter was drive D:, you will probably
notice that now your new hard drive has taken over the D:
drive slot, so your CD-ROM drive must be moved to, say
E:. But it is possible to choose any letter you like for
the CD-ROM drive. On my system, it is "M:" (it
came that way when I bought it; perhaps Hewlett Packard
chose drive M because that is the first letter of
Multimedia?)
Here is how you change your drive letter: click on the
Start button, choose Settings from the Start Menu, then
Control Panel. Double click on the System icon and click
on the Device Manager tab. There will be a plus sign next
to CDROM on this page, which acts much like the
corresponding plus sign in Windows Explorer: you click on
the plus sign (and thus incidentally changing it to a
minus sign) in order to expand the list of items. Now you
select your CD-ROM drive and click on the Properties tab.
In the section called Reserved Drive Letters, you can set
the start and end drive letters for the CD-ROM drive to
use. If you want to use Drive M, then just set both these
items to M, and finally click OK. You may then have to
change some of the shortcuts to your CD-ROM programs so
they use drive M: instead of D:, or you may even have to
re-install some of these programs so they will work
properly.