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I have Windows 7 and Windows 8 installed on my computer. I have a partition for each and a third partition. In Windows 8 they are labelled as:

  1. Windows 8 (C:)
  2. Windows 7 (D:)
  3. Local Disk (E:)

However, when in Windows 7 they appear as:

  1. Windows 8 (C:)
  2. Local Disk(D:)
  3. Windows 7 (E:)

So I'm wondering why the drive letters (D and E) get swapped around.

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    Why don't you just change this in Disk Mangement? Its not possible to tell you the reason Windows decided upon this.
    – Ramhound
    Feb 13, 2013 at 13:34
  • As such I don't have a problem if they get swapped around but I want to know the reason why it happens. Feb 13, 2013 at 13:36
  • Windows likes to organize disks in a certain way. Since C is likely where the boot information is Windows didn't change that. Once it got to the system disk it used the next drive letter free.
    – Ramhound
    Feb 13, 2013 at 14:41
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    There are some rules Windows follows, although I'm not exactly sure how it works with multi-booting scenarios from a single physical disk. Perhaps there's some documentation somewhere that explains it, but I don't think it's completely random as suggested below.
    – Karan
    Feb 14, 2013 at 16:42

1 Answer 1

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I remember reading somewhere that Windows assigns drive letters randomly, since it's just a letter and ultimately doesn't really effect anything. That may be why your Windows 8 is giving different drive letters from Windows 7.

If you do into the Disk Management tool you can assign letters to certain drives manually and then the OS will continue to use those letters. This is what I would do if you want your Windows 7 drives to be the same as Windows 8.

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  • it ultimately DOES affect things if you have a backup process copying files from E to F drive for instance!
    – Simon
    Dec 24, 2014 at 22:45

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