Renaming a DVD Drive

Steve059

I have a niggling little problem that's tasking me.

I had another problem, now resolved, where it was looking like I might have to reload the OS, with all the hassle of backing up and reloading all my data.

So, I've used Norton PartitionMagic to split my laptop's hard drive into two partitions, the original one for the OS (XP Pro', BTW), and another for data. The CD/DVD drive's letter has. of course, changed from to E:.

So far, so good. But ...

... it's now called a "Card Reader". The icon is correct and it works perfectly. If you right-click on it, there's no Rename option. If you go into Properties, the text box has a blinking cursor in it, but you can't type or copy/paste anything into it. I've also tried disabling and re-enabling it.

If you use My Computer > Manage > Disk Management to change the drive letter to, for example, Z:, it's called a "CD Drive" at first, which then changes to "DVD-RAM Drive" after a couple of seconds.

Any fixes? Where is the text string "Card Reader" hidden?

John_Gray

Have you actually got a card reader on your PC? And was it E:?

You could probably solve your problem by uninstalling all USB hubs and devices, rebooting, and letting Windows add them again. If you are less confident of Windows' recovery actions, just leave the CD/DVD drive at an 'out-of-the-way' drive letter.

Steve059

Yes, I have and, when a card was in it, it would've been allocated the next free drive letter, ie. E:.

I've uninstalled all of the USB controllers and hubs, rebooted and they've all re-installed. Still the same.

As I only disabled it before, I've uninstalled the DVD drive, rebooted and it re-installed. Still the same.

I've uninstalled the SD host controller, rebooted and it re-installed. Still the same.

I'll leave the drive letter as E:. As long as it's where it's expected to be and it works, Windows can call it what it likes.

Windows must be getting the text string "Card Reader" from somewhere. I think that we're talking registry ...

Steve059

Found it. Sorted. Failure was not an option.

For the benefit of anyone else with the same problem, or just wanting to rename a CD/DVD Drive in My Computer, this is how I did it.

Create a system restore point, so that you can put everything back if you have problems later. Name it DVD Rename.

Run regedit.

Backup the registry, so that you can put it back if you have problems later. Right click on Monitors and select Export. Name it Registry Backup and set the location to Desktop.

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ ...
... Explorer\DriveIcons\E\DefaultLabel.

Click on DefaultLabel and in the right pane there should be a string value named (Default).

Double click on (Default).

Change the valuedata to the name you want for your CD/DVD drive.

Click OK.

Exit the Registry Editor.

Reboot.

Delete Registry Backup from the Desktop.