Running Out of Drive Letters?

Fast forward more than three decades – 26 drive letters do not cut it! With ubiquitous terabyte hard drives containing four partitions and with network shares, including NAS devices, all over the place, it is not unusual to run out of drive letters. This article focuses on hard drives in a Windows PC, both internal and external (connected via USB, firewire, eSATA, whatever) and discusses one simple technique to free up drive letters (there are surely other methods, which perhaps some members will post in the comments). The article does not discuss the issue of network shares, which was addressed in a recent EE question entitled, Best practice assigning drive letters/mapping drives.

The default Windows behavior is to assign a drive letter for every formatted partition on a hard drive. But in many cases, you don't need the drive letters, as the devices are for backups, clones, disk images, or simply not accessed often. In these cases, it is possible (and easy!) to remove the drive letter assignments, so that these drive letters are available for other purposes, such as hard drive partitions and network shares that are accessed frequently, where having a drive letter is very convenient.

Removal of a drive letter may be accomplished in Disk Management, which is accessed as follows:

Control Panel
Administrative Tools
Computer Management
Disk Management

If you access Disk Management just occasionally, the four steps above are fine. But if you use it more often, I suggest putting a shortcut to it on your Start Menu, Taskbar, and/or Desktop (wherever you prefer). The shortcut should be to:

%SystemRoot%\system32\diskmgmt.msc

When running Disk Management, I recommend setting the top view to Volume List (via the menu View>Top) and the bottom view to Graphical View (via the menu View>Bottom). When you do that, you'll see something like this:


In this case, my Disk 1 is a clone of Disk 0 and I really don't need the drive letters (E, F, G) for its partitions, as the cloning software doesn't need them and I rarely look at its folders/files with my file manager. So, to remove a drive letter that has been assigned, right-click on it (in either the top view or bottom view) to get this context menu:


Then select Change Drive Letter and Paths..., which produces a dialog like this:


To remove the drive letter assignment, click the Remove button. You will get this warning:


Click the Yes button and the drive letter is gone! That letter is available now for any other usage. Of course, the procedure is easily reversed. So, if you want to reassign the drive letter, right-click on the partition, which still appears in the top and bottom views but without the drive letter, as shown in this screenshot after removal of the E drive:


Once again, right-click on the partition (in either the top view or bottom view); only the Add button will be active:


Click the Add button and you'll see this:


The Assign the following drive letter radio button will be enabled by default. You may now click the drop-down arrow next to the default drive letter shown (E in this case) and it will give you a choice of any available drive letter:


During the review/publication process, the always helpful EE Page Editors (in this case, lherrou and mark_wills) made suggestions for improvements to this article. One of those suggestions was a reminder about a big drive-letter villain – flash memory card readers. The problem is that a drive letter is typically assigned for every type of slot (CF, MemoryStick, MMC, SD, etc.) – even if no media is inserted! These card readers may be present in multiple places, such as monitors and all-in-one/multi-function devices. For example, I have a large LCD monitor with a built-in card reader that assigns four drive letters. Here's what Disk Management shows in the Graphical View:


This card reader in my monitor is eating up four drive letters – H, I, K and L. In this case, the List View does not show the drives. So to remove the drive letter, you must right-click on the disk icon in the Graphical View, as shown for Disk 5, Removable (H:) below:


Selecting Change Drive Letter and Paths... allows you to remove the drive letter, as discussed earlier in the article. After doing that for the four disks in the card reader, I recovered drive letters H, I, K and L:


Of course, you may wish to remove just some of the drive letters, not all. For example, you may frequently use the card reader for SD cards, so having a drive letter for that is convenient, but you may not even own any CF cards, so removing that drive letter makes sense.

One final point. It is possible to remove the drive letter, yet still be able to access the drive in your file manager. To achieve this, let's go back to the Add Drive Letter or Path dialog but, this time, enable the Mount in the following empty NTFS folder radio button:


You should have first created an empty folder on some other NTFS drive (this technique works only on NTFS-formatted drives) for every partition that you wish to be able to access in your file manager. For example, I created folders called zC-clone-home-dock, zD-clone-home-dock, and zJ-clone-home-dock in the root of my D drive (I put the letter z in front so they sort at the bottom of the D drive folders). These are empty folders that will be used to mount the partitions that previously had the E, F and G letters assigned (and are the clones of my C, D and J drives). With an (empty) folder created, click the Browse button in the Add Drive Letter or Path dialog and navigate to it. Here's what mine looks like for the cloned C drive:


I repeated this for the cloned D and J drives, and now I have links to those drives which may be used to access them, as shown in this screenshot of Windows/File Explorer:

Clicking on those links takes you into the drive in the same way as a drive letter!

Too bad that meeting in Bellevue didn't come up with an approach better than the 26-letter English alphabet, but I hope this article helps some EE members who are running out of drive letters.

If you find this article to be helpful, please click the thumbs-up icon below. This lets me know what is valuable for EE members and provides direction for future articles. Thanks very much! Regards, Joe