Lazybit

Most of us think that we're stuck with the letters assigned to the partitions by Windows - and that cannot be changed. C: will always be C: and D: will always be D:, etc.

If you are a Private Disk Light user, you may run into a problem - the disk cannot be mounted, because the letter it was supposed to be mapped to is already in use. Since Private Disk Light doesn't allow you to change the disk letter of the encrypted disk - you cannot access your data. There are several solutions to this problem.

Make sure the letters are available

Use the standard Disk Management tool (Start\Run\diskmgmt.msc) to modify the drive letter of an existing partition. You will see that letters can be changed at will, unless you're trying to change the letter of the system disk (in this case you will be trying to cut off the branch upon which you are standing).

Note that if you use NTFS, the partition can be mapped to a folder on another NTFS drive, not necessarily to a letter. Also, some partitions may not have a letter or a folder to which they are mapped - of course, the obvious disadvantage is that you won't be able to access them.

Install Private Disk (the non Light version)

With Private Disk, you get a lot of other security features, as well as many other handy features - among them is the possibility to edit the settings of an image and change its disk letter.

This approach is the opposite of the one. In the previous case we make available the desired letter, while in this one we "desire another letter".

You don't have to actually buy the program, you can make the changes while still in the trial mode (which is fully functional), and then go back to Private Disk Light. If you decide to stick to the full version, don't forget that you can get it for a discount.

Private Disk Explorer

PD Explorer is a new tool that is perfect for this job, if what you need is to simply extract the files from an encrypted image. Note that PD Explorer works with NTFS images, so it is not applicable if you have FAT32 or another file system.

This encrypted image browsing tool is not yet officially released, but you can get a copy from our forum.

Use another computer

Private Disk and Private Disk Light are both portable programs - they can run from removable disks without installation enabling you to encrypt a USB flash disk or a CD; all you need is another computer on which the disk letters you need are not in use.