how to change drive letter batch

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Batch File Assign Drive Letter

I have found this to work and added the shutdown and restart explorer to reflect drive changes.

I cannot get it tweaked to allow search by drive letter instead of drive description.

My reason for needing to change drive letter is due to the spreadsheets inside the flash media need locked onto a specific locked directory where user error is much lower.

This is a small part of a larger batch file which checks the current drive for correct letter assignment before allowing access to the folders inside.

• drive-letter

• Hi all, please keep discussion in the comments section civil (I've cleaned up the thread thus far). –  josliber ♦ May 30, 2018 at 1:33
• Josliber - Understood And Thank You My Apologies! –  TruckDriverOnPC May 30, 2018 at 2:48
• Compo - I Will Get The Code Added In Which I Have Had The Most Success So Far. I Appreciate The Comment And Also I Seen You Fixed My Code Pasted In Earlier Thank You For That As I Said I Am New And Just Got Enough Understanding To Paste Code Correctly. –  TruckDriverOnPC May 30, 2018 at 2:50
• 4 @TruckDriverOnPC - it's not correct English writing style to capitalize the first letter of every word. This makes what you have written more difficult to read. –  Bill_Stewart May 30, 2018 at 4:12
• Can you please explain why there's a need to assign a specific drive letter to the inserted USB? I cannot see the need for forcibly assigning it to W: as opposed to it being auto assigned, for instance, to F: . The script should easily be able to set whichever drive letter is assigned to the known label without having to do all of this. Please note, I'm not saying that your step is wrong, it just seems a lot of work for something which may not actually be needed. –  Compo May 30, 2018 at 10:39

The thing is that diskpart will always need admin rights to run, so it's better to avoid it if possible. Moreover if you leave the script on the flash drive you can't change the drive letter while running it anyway, because there will always an open handle on the drive so it can't be unmounted. If you force unmounting then the script will also stop running

Another problem is that you don't know if the user entered the correct drive letter. What if they entered a hard drive or another flash drive's letter?

It's better just to leave the drive letter as-is and mount the drive to another drive instead . You can use subst in a batch file instead (which can run by any users) and mount the drive that contains that batch file

if "%NewLetter:~1%"=="" will check if the user entered only letter instead of a longer string, then that drive letter will be checked if being used

If you put the batch file in the root of the flash drive you can simply use subst %NewLetter% . instead of %~d0

• The Only Letter To Be Assigned To This Drive Is A High Letter In This Case W:\ To Prevent User Error If They Have Many Flash Drives Etc On Their PC. I Haven't Really Considered Mounting It That Way. This Drive Will Contain Many Spreadsheets Which Call Upon Each Other During Use. That's Why I Wanted To Assign A Drive Letter. Hope That Can Make Some Sense. Also To Access The Files The Folders Are Hidden In A Maze Where The Only Sane Way To Access Them Is Run A Batch File That Will Verify The Drive Letter Of W:\ To Open Folder Or Bring Up An Error Screen. –  TruckDriverOnPC May 30, 2018 at 3:02

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Change a drive letter from Command Prompt or batch script in Windows 8?

I have an external hard drive that I connect often to my computer. At some point it was assigned letter G: and based on that my other software works.

Nowadays, suddenly it gets letter F:

Is there any way I can use a batch script to change the letter from F: to G:. I don't mind running the batch script manually?

If so, what is the code I should use and will it need administrative permissions?

• command-line

• 1 See diskpart and yes you need admin. In theory it should have remembered the drive letter, consider changing it manually on disk management first. –  Bob Jul 28, 2013 at 18:31
• @Bob: It could be that it only remembers drive letters after they have been assigned manually at least once. –  u1686_grawity Jul 28, 2013 at 19:57
• 1 Thanks! I have changed it a couple of times manually, but everytime it goes back to the old one. –  gontadu Aug 6, 2013 at 14:42
• I have noticed that it was remembered when I had one device using a drive letter. When I started using multiple devices with the same drive letter, they get forgot, I have not verified the hypothesis, but I guess Windows 10 remembers the last device assigned to a drive letter. –  BtF Aug 2, 2021 at 8:56

There are several methods:

mountvol – use it once to delete an existing letter, then again to assign a new one;

diskpart – interactive;

diskmgmt.msc aka Disk Management – a graphical tool.

Whichever you choose, assigning once should be enough, the assignment will be remembered afterwards.

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