Swap Drive Letters Between Two Bootable Drives
Aug 19, 2015
I upgraded my PC from W8.1 to W10, all went very smooth. I then worked on upgrading a laptop SSD drive to from W8.1 to W10 which I planned to then install in my wife's laptop. It was easier for me to upgrade the drive on my PC then swap the drives than take her laptop for awhile. Well...that created my problem. I had 2 drive C's on my PC.
I was able to boot quite a few times between the drives (swapping the primary drive in BIOS). But then W10 "fixed" my drives, and now I have only one C drive (the SSD laptop drive) and my original C drive is now F. My PC now only boots to the SSD C drive and I'm not able to use Disk Mgmt to swap the letters. Disconnecting the SSD drive stops the PC from booting because the original C drive is F.
How to either swap the drive letters or remove the SSD drive and somehow be able to rename the F drive to C.
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Sep 19, 2015
I have some harddrives on a "server" computer in my home-network running win 7. From my "client" running windows 10 I am mounting these drives using
psexec server -u username -p password -d net share F=F: /GRANT:user,Full /GRANT:media,read 2>nul
net use F: serverF
Today my client crashed and I had to remove the graphics card. Since then I cannot enter my network drives anymore, the commands seem to run, but when I try accessing the drives I get a message indicating I should put a media into these drives. Also, I cannot mount them manually using "map network drive" since the drive letters are not available.
I tried removing them from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMMountedDevices (they are listed there as "DosDevicesF" etc.), but once I restart, they are there (in the registry) again.
how I could fix this? Win10 somehow seems to remember that thes drives once have been there before and keeps blocking the drive letters...
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Aug 15, 2015
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I thought Win 10 would automatically spot my external drivers the moment I plugged them in? Then it would go search for and install the appropriate drivers - but it isn't doing that..
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Dec 27, 2015
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Feb 23, 2016
I have a new computer. I want to clone the system to a new SSD. Can I change the drive letter of the SSD to C: after cloning?
My new computer (an ASUS) currently has Windows 8.1. I intend to upgrade to Windows 10 before I do anything more. I will move the old Windows elsewhere before cloning if that is possible.
I have the SSD installed physically but it is not formatted or anything. I intend to use the Samsung Data Migration tool to do the clone. During the clone, the SSD will of course not have the drive letter "C". After the cloning, it must have the drive letter "C", correct? I know we can assign drive letters in Disk Management. I am familiar with partitions and I know that the boot drive/partition is marked as "Active".
Can I re-assign drive letters in Disk Management and delay the change until the next boot? This is just a guess, but it makes sense that the feature might exist. In other words, after the clone, can I change the drive letter ("C") of the current drive to something such as "T" and the SSD drive's letter to "C" and then the change will be effective upon the next boot? The hard drive has a second partition that is empty and is the "D:". It will be confusing for others to have the SSD partition as "C:" and the first partition some other letter and the second partition as "D:" but I understand and I am the only one that will use it. That is a minor detail.
I do not intend to use the old Windows after the successful clone unless I need to remove the SSD for return to ASUS. My new computer had a bad motherboard when I received it but I hope I do not need to return it again.
I know that some people will suggest that I do a fresh install. (I see: Clean Install Windows 10 Directly without having to Upgrade First - Windows 10 Forums.). I want to avoid doing that if possible. I am not sure that I can install everything else that ASUS installs but hopefully that is possible. If however I can simply swap drive letters after the clone then that should be the simplest solution.
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Feb 10, 2016
How do I assign a range of letters, that can be used for e.g. external flash disks, external ssd's/hdd's or memory cards?
I have this nasty issue. I have two Network Attached Drives, on server. They work fine, D and E. But I also have NAS [DS 716+] which is on NAS drive F:. Whenever I shut down my DS 716+, and I connect some external hdd/ssd/memory card, it always asigns letter F:. Which makes these devices quiet inaccessible, or hard accessible, I can't double click them to open, I need to type in manually F: etc.
Is there any way via msc or something, where I can define a range of all external hdd's/ssd's and/or memory cards?
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Nov 4, 2015
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I am "testing" Win10 using a bootable clone of my main SSD (that still has 8.1 on it) and I upgraded it to 10 just to mess with so I can figure out this ridiculous problem.
My problem is that all of my internal SATA hard drives (with the exception of the system drive) cannot be assigned a drive letter in Disk Management. They show as healthy NTFS partitions but I get 1 of 2 different errors when I click on "Change Drive letters and Paths":
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2 "Disk Management: The operation filed to complete because the Disk Management Console view is not up-to date. Refresh the view by using the refresh task. If the problem persists close the Disk Management console, then restart disk management or restart the computer" Hint: none of the recommended fixes in the error message change anything.
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Oct 27, 2015
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I really wanted a less cluttered setup - so when all these partitions were created, particularly 'D' & 'E', i was perplexed as to why they were created.
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Jan 2, 2016
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Jan 15, 2016
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Dec 18, 2015
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Aug 4, 2015
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