The File Explorer in Windows 8 shows all of your hard disks and other removable storage media. It labels all these drives with volume names followed by the drive letters, for example, Local Disk (C:). But this can make it confusing to find a drive by drive letter, specially if you have a large numbers of disks and other media connected to your computer. What you can do is make Windows display the drive letters before the volume names, for example, (C:) Local Disk. Here is how :
- Press Windows logo key + R. In the Run dialog, type regedit and press Enter.
- In the Registry Editor window navigate to the following registry key :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
- Select the Explorer key. Then in the right-side panel right-click and select New → DWORD (32-bit) value and create a value named ShowDriveLettersFirst.
- Double-click on the newly created DWORD value and set its value to 4.
- That’s it. Now you can open File Explorer to view the changes. If you already have File Explorer open, then press the F5 to refresh it.
If you do not want to go through all these steps, then you can just download the registry script win8_show_drive_letters_before.zip. Extract the contents of the ZIP file to a folder and then double-click on Add.reg to make the changes. If later you decide to remove these settings, then you can double-click on Remove.reg file.