HowTo: Use a Drive Letter for a Shared Folder on Another Computer

Sometimes when you're working with multiple computers, life becomes a lot easier if you tell Windows to treat a shared folder on another computer as if it were a drive on this computer.

Tech Tip
Those of who have been around for a long time usually call it "Mounting" a folder as a drive letter. Mounting is a word left over from the old days of removable hard drives and tapes. You had to tell the system that the device was there and you had to tell it which how to access the drive.


Windows XP lets us do that via the one of the menu options in Windows Explorer. You can find it at Tools > Map Network Drive...


Once we click on the "Map Network Drive..." from the pull-down menu, Windows opens the dialog box where we set our options.


In the next two dialog boxes, we browse to locate the network, then the computerr and then, finally, the shared folder we want to map as a drive letter in our computer.


After clicking the OK button on the Browse dialog box, I'm returned to the Map Network Drive dialog box. Notice that I've selecteded M: for the drive (to be known as on my computer) and the Folder now shows \\Aiel\Files\DragonI5000 (computer Aiel, folder \files\DragonI5000) as the folder to be shown as M:.

Notice the "Reconnect at logon" checkbox. This is your last chance to have the connection made automatically when you log into Windows, or when you start Windows, if you're not using multiple userID's on your computer.

In the final image, we see that Windows Explorer shows the mapped, shared file folder from the computer Aiel as M:, just as I wanted. fofun


WIndows will only mount a shared network drive folder, but fortunately, when you browse, it shows you your computer as part of the network neighborhood. I successfully shared and then mounted a flash drive on the same computer. If I did the "safe removal" and reinserted it, it still worked. But, when I rebooted, Windows lost the "shared" status. So, it looks like you can re-reference a folder on one of your internal hard drives as a drive letter.