How to Change an Officejet Drive Letter

When you connect an Officejet printer to a computer, the printer picks the next available letter in the alphabet as the drive letter. For computers with no additional drives installed, this drive letter is usually "D," which comes immediately after the drive letter of the local hard drive, which is usually "C." In computers that have other built-in drives, such as a CD or memory card drive, the drive letter may be further along in the alphabet, such as "G" or "H." If you would like to change an Officejet drive letter, you can do so in the registry.

• 1

  Backup your computer's registry using the built-in System Restore function. Access System Restore by clicking "Start," "All Programs," the "Accessories" folder, the "System Tools" folder and then "System Restore." Click "Create a Restore Point" to enter a name for the backup and press "Enter" to create the backup file.

• 2

  Log in to the computer as the administrator if you are not already logged in as administrator. If you did not create an administrator password when you configured your computer, type "Administrator" into the "Username" field and leave the password field blank. Press "Enter" and, in most cases, the computer logs you in as administrator.

• 3

  Open the "Start" menu and type "regedit" into the search box if you have a Windows Vista or Windows 7 system, or, if you have an older system, click "Run" from the menu and then enter "regedit" in the box and press "Enter." Once in the registry, click the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" folder, the "SYSTEM" folder and the "MountedDevices" folder.

• 4

  Pull down the "Security" menu and select "Permissions." Click "Administrators" in the top pane and make sure the box in the "Allow" column next to "Full Control" is checked. If the box isn't checked, click it to put a check mark in it and then click "OK."

• 5

  Right-click the current drive letter being used for the Officejet printer. Choose "Rename" from the menu that comes up and change the drive letter to any letter that is not already in use.

• 6

  Close the registry editor and restart the computer. When the system reboots, the Officejet drive letter will be changed. You can verify the change by going to "Start" and clicking "Computer" or "My Computer" to view the drive list.