Solved Revised: Unable to Change a Drive Letter

My new computer arrived with one hard drive. I partitioned that hard drive in the typical way: C for SYSTEM and D for DATA. Then I moved my user folders from C to D. Everything worked fine.

Eventually, I bought a second hard drive and called it F. My goal is to use the original hard drive for my system, and the new hard drive for my data. To begin, I moved all my user folders from D to F. Everything worked fine.

Next, I went into Disk Management and deleted the now empty D partition. Then I expanded C into the empty space. So now I have two physical hard drives: C and F. So far, all good.

In Disk Management, I changed the drive letter of the second physical hard drive from F to D, because I always store my data in the D drive. But after a restart, Windows was still looking for my user folders in F - which no longer existed. As a result, Windows didn't know where to find my user folders. Once I changed the D drive back to F, everything was back to normal.

How can I rename my F drive to D? Thanks very much for your help.

The problem is solved!

The reason why Windows could not find my user folders is that at the time I changed the drive letter from F to D, one or more Windows processes was still open on the F drive. Thus, even though I could change the drive letter to D, as far as Windows knew, my user folders were still on a drive with the letter F.

As a precaution, I moved all my user folders back to the C drive. Maybe I didn't have to do that, but I wasn't taking any chances.

To solve my problem, I rebooted into Safe Mode. As I suspected, whatever Windows processes that were active on my F drive in regular Windows were not active on the F drive in Safe Mode. I was able to change the drive letter to D with no problems at all.

Back in regular Windows, I moved my user folders to the D drive and now all is well.

"Hello Safe Mode my old friend,
I've come to hack with you again."

Another thing to keep an eye out for is if you accidentally leave in a USB stick or you have a DVD/CD ROM drive. Windows will sometimes inadvertently "steal" a drive letter you intended to use and ascribe it to one of these. Happy to hear the problem is solved.