Windows 10: Removable drives not automatically reassigned drive letters when unplugged and switch around.

I have an external card reader and a few USB drives, and they are all stuck assigned to the same drive letters that Windows automatically assigned them when first used. I have unplugged them all at one point or another without ejecting them from Windows, and though they all work without problems, it is somewhat concerning for me, as in the future, I may put another drive inside my computer, and there may be a conflict between an internal drive and removable media.

As an example, if I plug in USB drive #1, then USB drive #2, and then remove them both and reinsert them into the computer's USB ports in a different order, they still use the same drive letters from when I first activated the drives; including the card reader and its two slots. It may be because I have used the card reader wrong tried to rename an empty slot once LOL and broke a driver or registry key by doing so. I have the latest stable version of Windows 10 Update 1909, and I was wondering if there is any way to fix it without resetting/reinstalling the OS and wiping personal data? Thanks!

:)

 

Drive Letters, will they be overwritten or reassigned?


if you want to assign new letters to the new drives and keep you current drive letters assigned like they are now i suggest you take a screenshot of pc so you can manually reassign the various drive letters. i have the following saved in a folder on my backup drive called post os install. hope this helps.





fyi after fixing the drive letter assignments i hide the drive letters so everything lines up numerically and alphabetically

 

Drive Letters, will they be overwritten or reassigned?

Thank you for your help and assistance xXWhacerXx! If you can clarify this first, because I believe I saw a warning on this that by changing the drive letter can ruin other things that are mapped to it. I would like to not change the drive letters once they are assigned, but if you are not having any problems I guess that could be something that I saw wrong.

Also, do you think that having the drive letters as explained before and plugging in the other ones that had the same drive letter will overwrite the new ones or change them automatically?

 

WD external drive letter change

Hi @WilliamSlessor!

I'm sorry to hear about the confusion with the external drive. What I would suggest is to go in Disk Management and try to reassign the letters on both drives with a third one, and then go back to the original letters. For instance - change the G:G: drive to
M:, and then reassign it as G: again.

You can follow the steps described in this KB article:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=T1tsut

Hope this helps and let us know how it went.