Ask Felgall

If you allow your CD-ROM/DVD drive to take whatever drive letter your system assigns to it then any changes you make to your system such as adding an extra hard drive will result in the drive letters for your removable media drives changing. This will break any links to that media that you have saved as shortcuts on your computer. In order to avoid this happening you can easily change the drive letter to something further along the alphabet using a letter that makes sense to you and freeing up the earlier letters for the system to reallocate as needed.

In this article I show how to change the drive letter allocation in the now obsolete Windows 95/98/SE/ME range of operating systems. More modern windows operating systems also provide an option to do this but it is accessed a different way. I suppose I really ought to write a new version of this page for the operating systems that people are using now.

Assigning a Different Drive Letter to the CD ROM Drive

I would have thought that everyone would have upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows XP by now given that it is now several years since Microsoft dropped support for that old DOS antique. Not so as I still get the occasional question about that old operating system. Some of those are looking to make the move though as this recent question demonstrates.

Upgrading to XP