My cd and cd-rw drives have arbitraily gotten new drive names and nothing is working on them now. Help!?

Question

They have gone from E and I believe F, to K & L. Before I have someone work on it, is there a way I can correct this myself?

Answer 1

If you're using Windows XP (and possibly Vista works this way also, I don't know),

first, set a system restore point so that if things do get screwed up, you can easily fix it.

Then:
right click on 'my computer' and select 'manage'

In the 'computer management' interface left click 'disk management'

On the right hand panel, at the bottom is a graphical list of all your various drives.

If there is something in the position for E: then you will want to change it to be some other letter by right clicking on it and choosing 'Change Drive Letter and Paths'. Change it to be Q or something like that. You'll get a message telling you that if you do this, some programs might not work (just like some of your programs that were accessing your cd roms aren't working now), Answer YES you want to change. Do the same thing if anything but your cd-rw is in the position for F:

Now try to use the same method to position your cd drives back to where they were. You may have to reboot so that whatever was in position E: is no longer taking that space. After you get your cd's back to where you want them then put the thing you had to move up the letter list to K or something like that.

A bit of disclaimer....depending on what has caused this reassignment of drive letters, you might just as well run your cd programs from different drive letters, (and once you run your pogram from there, the system should look for it there the next time) because some devices are pretty insistent about their position. For instance, I have a SD card reader on one of my printers. It is ALWAYS seen as the D: drive even though I have other hard drives present. And I know that as soon as I put a SD card in the other printer to be read that IT will insist on being the E: drive, so, I have set my cd-roms to be F: and G: and my other hard drives to be H: etc. I don't like this, but at least I can always find my stuff when I want it!