Try to change drive letter in Disk Management and get a dialog box titled “Virtual Disk Manager” – “The parameter is Incorrect”
Posted by: djjlewis on: 04/12/2009
UPDATE: I was just a little too hasty posting this entry. After reading the recommendations for booting from a VHD on TechNet it turns out that putting the page file on a physical drive rather than the virtual is required for performance reasons. In my case I just moved it to a different physical drive before changing the drive letter below.
I have just setup a new Windows Server 2008 R2 installation using the new boot from VHD functionality in Windows 7 (but that’s another story).
One of the things that happens is that you still get to see all of your existing drives and partitions.
I wanted to change the drive letter on my second drive, so went into “Disk Management” as usual but was surprised to see a dialog box informing me that “The parameter is incorrect” – very helpful.
After a few internet searches mainly referencing to external drives (which this is not), I suddenly spotted that the drive in question was holding the page file.
When Windows was installed, it must have chosen to put the page on this drive (whether for performance or just because there was more space available).
As it turns out, you can’t change or remove a drive letter that is holding the active page file, so a quick trip through “System Properties”, “Advanced”, “Performance”, “Advanced”, “Virtual Memory”, “Change…” [pause for deep breath] I moved the page file and after a quick reboot was able to change the drive letter at last.
11 Responses to "Try to change drive letter in Disk Management and get a dialog box titled “Virtual Disk Manager” – “The parameter is Incorrect”"
15/02/2011 at 04:46
didnt work for me!!! 
!
any other ideas? we’re you guys changing the C: System Partition?
28/02/2011 at 04:23
thank you so much for this! i just had to explain my computer-illiterate father on another continent how to switch drive letters and this got rid of a problem we experienced!
19/07/2011 at 21:54
Worked like a charm! Thanks for saving me a lot of troubleshooting time!
01/09/2011 at 17:23
Nice! Worked for me… To the guy who asked about changing the C: drive letter, you can’t. This is the system drive and there are too many settings (registry, ini’s, etc) that have a reference to c:. If you were to change it, nothing would work!
08/02/2012 at 16:52
Thanks, this saved some troubleshooting time. Got to love those descriptive error messages.
10 | The Le (@TheLe)
11/03/2012 at 01:38
A huge THANK YOU for this article. I did just as you suggested and it worked like a charm. That error’s been driving me nuts for hours!
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01/11/2010 at 14:22
Thanx for the tip — this really cleared up about 2 hours of troubleshooting renaming the drive letter on one of my Win2K8R2 servers. What a terrible waste of time spent on something so trivial.