Cannot Change Drive Letter

Anonymous

Vita 64 Ultimate. I have an external eSATA unit for backups. Recently got SSD for second drive in my laptop. After formatting, Vista assigned the SSD drive F: which had been being used by the external drive. Disk Management->Change Drive Letter and Paths->Change Drive Letter returns a Logical Disk Manager error message saying Parameter is Incorrect. Removing the drive letter appears to work, but rescanning or refreshing Disk Manager causess the letter to reappear. I need to swap these drive letters. Can you assist?

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Anonymous

ACTUALLY I got it to work, finally. I am not technical. So just use minitool partition wizard, found here:

http://download.cnet.com/Partition-Wizard-Home-Edition/3000-2094\_4-10962200.html?tag=mncol;6

open the program, right-click on the drive you want to change
select "change letter"
click the drop down box by "new drive letter"
select the letter you want to change it to
click "ok"
at the bottom left corner of the program click "apply"

and that's how you do it

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Anonymous

Hello kd4wat,

Thank you for your reply!

The error "Parameter is Incorrect" is an indication that the drive is in use. I have added some steps below that I hope will correct your issue. Please let me know status.

To change the drive letter or paths in Windows Vista, just follow these simple steps:

Right click on Computer and select Manage to open and access Computer Management Console.
Navigate to and expand the Storage section, and click on Disk Management to access Disk Management Console.
Disk Management Console display the details of all available volumes and disk drives in the computer configuration in the right pane.
Right click on the volume or disk drive that you want to change the drive letter, and select “Change Drive Letter and Paths).
Then click on “Change” button.
Use the drop down list to select the new and your desired drive letter to assign to the disk volume.
Click OK.
Click Yes to confirm.

Any letter between C and Z can be assigned to a hard disk drive, CD drive, DVD drive, portable external hard disk drive, or USB flash memory key drive, while floppy disk drives use up letters A and B. Beside, the drive letter for the system volume or boot partition cannot be modified or changed. And if you install some applications or programs in the drive that you have just changed the drive letter, they may not functioning properly after the change due to the possibilities that the programs will also refer to the specific drive letter or original path used when installation as environmental variables.

James Microsoft Answers Support Engineer Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.

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57 additional answers

Anonymous

2016-05-25T22:20:12+00:00

There is another item which will cause this problem.

I use a small SSD for the operating system, and a small HD which I let it use for the paging file. One has to remove the paging file before one can move the drive letter. After that, one can put the paging file back on.
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Anonymous

2016-12-22T11:50:17+00:00

I think the problem is not that he doesn't know how to change the drive letter but it's when he try to change it it gives him error "the parameter is incorrect"
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Anonymous

2017-01-04T10:46:05+00:00

i have this same error, think its related to my Pagefile and it will block you to change the drive letter assignments.
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