changing drive letter names.

Usually when this happens it's because another drive was added to the system. What operating system do you use? I'll assume windows (or as I like to call it winblows).

Normally, when another drive is added the system automatically assigns drive letters according to a jumper that is on the device (ie: hard drive has three setting with the physical jumper on the end of it, cable select, master and slave). You don't really need to know the jumpers but if you have added another hard drive to your system or a new one, cable select is the way to go that way the bios (on the mother board, a little firmware program that tells the mother board what to do and how) tells the system what is what. Just easier that way and hence the auto detection of master boot hard drives, slave drives, ect.

Now to change it you need to make sure nothing else is labelled as what you want to change it to. For example if your cd rom is H: and you want to change your hard drive to H: you first need to change the cd rom to something else. Same for any device you have on there including flash sticks, memory sticks, hard drives, flash drives, zip drives, ect.

How to change it:

Right click the drive
rename should be down at the bottom, if not, go to properties
in properties you should see in the general tab "label" under drive or hard drive or whatever the device is

It should be available to you to change it there (it is grayed out if not).

If it's grayed out, you have jumper select problem and must correct that problem first.

Another way to rename is to go to my computer, click once on the drive and it should pop up blank to type a new name into it just like a file or folder can be done in the same manner.

TT

BTW: You should not have issues with losing information just from a device name change...is it possible this is a symptom of a viral infection (I've seen it before) that you may have acquired? I suggest Nero, a dvd burner and a back up of the most important files and reinstalling your operating system at the very least get a good anti-viral program (Avira, Avast - both free) and spyware program (Spybot S&D also free) and run it on your system to make sure you aren't infected and having a viral issue rather than a operating system issue.

TT - I expect that the "killed stuff" is not working because of the drive letter change, not because of malware. If any programs are installed on drive X or have important files there, they are simply lost in space when it becomes drive Y. Software is very simple-minded. My system is quite decentralized, there would be awesome chaos if drives changed.

Be sure to create a restore point before messing with drive letters! (And know how to use system restore)

I have changed drive letters with no issues what so ever, as well as drive labels (inter changeable) and have never seen a problem with loss of information. I've worked with windows 3.1 all the way to winxp pro\home (and in between) and have never encountered this issue without it being either a pooched operating system that requires a reinstall or a virus. I am an IT tech by trade...I find it odd that there is an information issue with a simple drive letter change considering I've done it so many times without issues.

Then again, could be a glitch in that particular build of winblows...it's known to happen all the time. If it weren't for hubbs being inept with Linux and not a lot of software being compatible with it I'd be a Linux user all the way...darn "mount" and "unmount" commands confuse my husband *lol*

The "stuff" (all the different applications programs) on your computer has default ways and places it accesses files. You can either get the old drive letter back as you want to do (presuming that's easy or possible), or change each program's options/defaults to access the same files at the new drive letter. Why are these programs not accessing files on the default C: drive? Are you running on a network at work where they're supposed to access the I: drive on a network server? If so there should be some IT person that handles this stuff and should be able to fix it for you. I only see these other drive letters because my computer has four different flash memory slots it can use as drives (in addition to using a USB "thumb" drive).

So what is the I: drive? Is it a network drive? A flash mempory adaptor slot? The times I've seen things like this is when some other drive (such as the CDROM which is often drive D: ) becomes broken and fails to be recognized on bootup, and all the drive letters afterwird (F:, G:, H:, I:, J:...) move up a letter (become E:, F:, etc). Was there a drive you perhaps don't often use that is now "missing" to Windows?

Aren't computers frustrating?