Can someone tell me if I can change drive letter like this

Hello,
I just had to do a fresh install of my win7 ultimate and as always windows changes the drive letters. without going into a lot of stuff you don't want to know my problem is.

I have a redundant backup system on my drives for example I had drive L: F Drive and that had a copy of my F drive and I had a O:f Drive with a second copy. OK I'm anal..lol

Now that my drives are all different letters on this new install of windows I have a problem.

Can I do this, I know I can change the letter to whatever I want but if I change F drive to S will F be available to me to use. My F drive is now E and want to change all the letters to letters that I didn't have and then change them again to the letters I did have to keep my backup correct. I am wondering if I change a letter is the old letter available to me to use again.

Thanks hope this isn't so confusing

Yes, the old letter that is released will be available to be assigned to another drive.

The post is a bit confusing, but in my experience you can change drive letters at will from D on through Z, as long as you don't attempt to use a letter that is already in use.

If D is changed to R, then F can be renamed D.

Etcetera.

Great, I wanted to make sure that once I changed a letter it would still be available to use for a drive that was F but now E I can now change E to F and still use F again.

Thanks sorry for being confusing

Lady Fitzgerald said:

As already stated, the old letter will become available again. However, I question how you are doing things.

First, if you had the C: and System Reserved partitions, with just the OS and programs in it, on their own drive, all you would have to do to avoid the drive letter changes would be to disconnect the other drives while doing the install. If you want to get a serious performance increase, put the C: and System Reserve partitions on a SSD.

Second, although having multiple backups is a very good idea (you aren't the only one who is anal here; I have four backup drives for each drive in use), keeping them inside your computer is not a good idea. While they will help protect against drive failure, if a virus or other malware should get into your machine, all your data, including the backups, could be corrupted or destroyed or the PSU could short out and fry your drives. It would be much safer to keep your backup drives outside the machine and connect them, using a dock or by keeping them in individual enclosures, only while updating the backup.

Yes I thought just like you for a long time. Then I had a external drive fry and it caused all kins of issues. I guess if it is time for a system to blow up....lol it will happen. My next build will be with SSD but so far knock on wood my backup system has worked good and never needed the extra backups. But I had them... I even had a PSU blow and my drives made it through it.. Fingers crossed

This system has been going great for 6 years now. Thanks for your reply

I was able to change the letters on all but one drive. I just installed windows7 again today and don't have my ftp software installed yet so I can show you what happened but I will see if I can explain it .

I followed the tutorial to change letters on this forum, I changed the letters as follows:
D TO P
E TO Q
L TO R
F TO S
N TOT
O TO U
G TO V
H TO W
M TO X

Then I changed the letters again to,
F
D
G
E
H
L
M on M i had a problem it wasn't available
N
O
Then I rebooted and when my system came up the P was now a "I"

I read the option # to change in the reg. when I went to regedit I saw that M was still listed and there was 1 or 2 more that I didn't use but they were still there. since I done want to mess with the registry on things I didn't understand and what I saw I didn't understand. So I can deal with using "I" instead of "M"

If anyone is interested I will post with pictures when I setup my ftp.