StableBit DrivePool Q4822624
Change the Drive Letter to folder path for Disks
When to Use
- When you have a large number of disks (Windows limits you to 26 drive letters max); or
- You want to keep the drives organized, and not listed in the "Computer"
While having the drives mounted to a letter or folder isn't necessary for DrivePool to manage the drives, it does make it easier to maintain the drives yourself. Some tasks require that you have the drives mounted to either a letter or a NTFS folder, such as running a disk check (even from command line), or accessing the data yourself.
Steps
- Follow: Q7200705
- Hold the "Windows" Key, and press "R"
- Type diskmgmt.msc and hit "OK"
- Right click on the Partition on the drive that you wish to change, and select "Change Drive Letter and Path..."
- Hit "Add...".
- Choose the "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder:"
- Note: If you already have a Drive Letter for the drive it will only let you choose this option.
- Either hit "Browse" and find the folder you want to mount the drive to, or type it into the text box.
- Hit OK
- Right Click on the same partition and select "Change Drive Letter and Path..."
- Select the Drive Letter, (D:\, E:\, etc) and hit "Remove".
- It will warning you that "Users will no longer be able to access files by using this path. Are you sure you want to remove this drive path?". This is okay, so hit Yes
Guidelines for Mounting drives to Paths
A couple of things to note here, is that you can only mount a drive to an empty folder, and that folder must be on an NTFS drive. For the post part, you won't have to worry about that.
Now, how you should mount the drives to paths is a bit more complicated. For simplicity, you should use a single folder to hold all the folders. Such as "C:\DrivePool\". Then create folders inside of "C:\DrivePool\" for each drive you want to mount. For example, if you have 3 internal drives and two external drives, and a USB drive, you could create "I01", "I02", and "I03" for the internal drives, "E01" and "E02" for the external drives and "U01" for the USB drive. This way, the drives are easily identifiable, both if you need to browse the drives, or in Scanner and DrivePool as it lists these "mount paths".