Today’s Question: Can you explain how to assign the drive letter on Windows so that my external hard drive will always have the same drive letter?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can change the drive letter for a hard drive in Windows using the Disk Management feature. This enables you to ensure an external hard drive always gets the same drive letter assignment, so that for example the drive doesn’t appear missing in Lightroom Classic.
More Detail: By assigning a specific drive letter to a hard drive in Windows you’ll ensure that drive is always assigned that same drive letter, which can help avoid problems such as folders appearing as missing in Lightroom Classic because a drive was assigned a different drive letter when connected to the computer.
To get started, right click on the Start button and choose “Disk Management” from the popup menu. Right-click on the hard drive letter in the Volume column near the top-left of the dialog and choose “Change Drive Letter and Paths”. In the dialog that appears, click the Change button. In the next dialog make sure the “Assign the following drive letter” option is selected and then choose the desired drive letter from the popup to the right. Click the OK button for each of the two dialogs, and then you can quit Disk Management.
If you’re using Lightroom Classic you would ideally only want to change the drive letter to reflect what Lightroom Classic is expecting for the hard drive. If you otherwise need to change the drive letter assignment, then all folders and photos on that drive will appear missing in Lightroom Classic. However, you can resolve that issue by using the “Find Missing Folder” command to reconnect the top-level folder in the Folders list for the applicable hard drive to the same location on the drive with the new drive letter assignment.
Note that for Macintosh users hard drives are tracked by the volume label, not a drive letter. The equivalent to changing the drive letter assignment would be to simply rename a hard drive to change the volume label.
