1:00 AM
Paul B
I would like to preface this post by saying that I can’t think of a good reason for doing this. I learned about this in my early IT days because we had these desktop computers we supported that had an internal media card reader. Windows would assign all the different slots as drive letters, and rather clutter up “My Computer”. My Help Desk supervisor got it in her head that the best way to take care of it was with the mount drive to folder trick.
Not long after that I started getting into Linux, and as Linux users know, that is just how stuff is done in Linux. Drives and partitions are mounted to folders. Simple right? Well, you can do it in Windows too.
To mount a disk/partition to a folder in Windows do the following:
- Create a folder where you want to mount your disk or partition. I created a folder in the root of C: called Mount:
- Next open up Disk Management right-click on the disk or partition you want to mount and select Change Drive Letters and Paths.
- Select Remove, and click OK when you see the warning.
- Now right-click it again and select Change Drive Letters and Paths.
- Click Add
- Click the radio button that says Mount in The Following Empty NTFS Folder.
- Click Browse and browse to the folder you created in the first step then click OK.
- Now if you go back to your C: drive you will see the folder you created looks a little different…
Pretty cool right? Once again, I have never found a good use for this, but it’s interesting to know you can do it. Especially if you prefer to do things the Linux way.
Do you do this on your Windows machines? Why do you do it? Got a really good reason to mount disks or partitions to a folder instead of assigning it a drive letter? Let us know in the comments.
